Talking with Neighbours: reimagining the institution

During this day of open discussions and actions we are thinking about how museums need to reconfigure in the face of new cultural politics.

How can cultural institutions re-imagine themselves to address new political and cultural realities? What kind of infrastructures do they need to do so? This day brings together museum, artist, and activist voices to explore how institutional infrastructures can be mobilised in different ways to evolve a collective understanding of how they work.

This event takes inspiration from Tania Bruguera’s Turbine Hall commission, where she uses activist strategies to explore how Tate Modern can be a platform for its local neighbours and migrant community audiences. As Tania’s commission draws to a close, the day attempts to reflect on methods used, and look forward to test new ways to intervene with the underlying structures of the museum.

Let’s discuss how cultural institutions, such as Tate, could utilise processes like HR, administration and communication to be creative tools for transforming the political and cultural role of the public museum.

This event is co-produced by Theatrum Mundi, Susannah Haslam, and Tate Public Programmes. It is free and open to drop in all day.

PROGRAMME

12.00 – 13.00 Infrequently Asked Questions
What would you like to know about museums but have never been able to ask? How do they decide what to show? Who’s really in charge? And as Eva Rowson has asked, ‘who does the washing up?’ Shaz Hussain, Priya Khanchandani, Janine Francois, and Tania Bruguera give quick-fire responses to questions from the room and collected on social media prior to the event.

13.00 – 14.30 Informal Lunch with Tate Neighbours
Eat together with Tania Bruguera and members of Tate Neighbours and find out how they worked with Tania to make new links between Tate and its surroundings, through manifesto-writing, re-naming, and community organising.

Parallel movement workshop with Zinzi Minott. Sign up here.

15.00 – 16.30 Enacting New Models – and keeping them going
How are different types of work – from artistic to cleaning – acknowledged and valued in future organisations? Who gets to have a voice in these imaginings? And who’s doing the washing up? A group session led by Eva Rowson and Natasha Cox thinks about how to make small changes in our everyday work which can propose new models – and make it possible to sustain them. As workers in arts organisations we find ourselves replicating, often without realising, formats and behaviours behind the scenes that our public programmes and panel discussions claim to be re-thinking. Institutions and grant-makers set out to imagine ’radical’ new models, but tend to avoid re-thinking the structures which support them.

This session will share different examples and exercises to discuss how we can manifest our politics into the structures of work that we create or find ourselves in. So that we don’t just reproduce the same models, narratives and values but can actually implement change on a daily, revolutionary, and sustainable basis.

17.00 – 19.00 Talk and panel: on cultural infrastructure
Presentation by Yuri Pattison of his work ‘user, space’ followed by panel discussion with Andrea Phillips, Irit Rogoff, and Natalie Bell. Chaired by Susannah Haslam and John Bingham-Hall.

If we can understand the notion of infrastructure, and act of infrastructuring, as both an object and method when attempting to expose and attend to questions surrounding cultural infrastructure, then how might such an object and method materialise? Tania Bruguera’s commission marks a pivotal moment that questions the museum’s capacity to really open itself up to critical and necessary intervention; more generally, there might be several critical trajectories that Bruguera’s work opens up, which interlink around the moment of infrastructure, through its arrest, intervention, and artistic co-option.

• Then, what is meant by cultural infrastructure, specifically at the point of the museum?
• Can artists and artistic thinking really have an impact on the deep structures within museums?
• How can museums infrastructure themselves in the face of new political and social questions, specifically when we ask what some future conditions might be for culture in cities?

We ask these questions to an end of putting existing cultural infrastructure to work, materialising existing infrastructural frameworks, over simply, their critical diagnosis.

Bios

Tania Bruguera makes work that addresses institutional power, borders and migration. She has established a unique concept for her political approach to art – Arte Util (useful art) – one that has continued to be developed during her Hyundai Commission and will continue with Tate Exchange. Over the past 20 years, Bruguera has become renowned for creating art that addresses major political concerns, often taking the form of a political or social action. Her work questions the nature of power structures, behaviours and values. She has consistently argued for art’s role as a useful agent of real change in the world, while using the museum as an active forum for public debate.

Shaz Hussain is an Assistant Curator at the Science Museum and a member of Museum Detox, a professional network for people of colour working in museums. She is also the creator of the White Privilege Clinic, a creative intervention that challenges people to rethink systemic and institutional racism in the arts and heritage sector.  Shaz is interested in how we can better represent people of colour in museums both in the collections and the workforce.

Priya Khanchandani specialises in the dissemination of ideas about contemporary design and Indian culture through curating, writing and arts management. In 2018, she was appointed Deputy Editor of monthly design and architecture magazine ICON, before being quickly promoted to Editor. She also curated the India Pavilion at London Design Biennale, held at Somerset House and titled State of Indig

Janine Francois is a Black-Feminist cultural producer and associate lecturer at University of the Arts. Her practices centres women/femmes of colour by establishing ‘safe’ spaces as sites of resistance, disruption and co-production. Janine is researching “if Tate can be a ‘safe(r) space’ to discuss race and cultural difference within a teaching and learning context.” She is interested in (re)production of dominance, ethics of care and the cultural politics of emotions (Ahmed, 2004) within cultural and heritage spaces. You can follow her thoughts via Instagram at: @itsjaninebtw or via her blog: itsjaninebtw.com

Zinzi Minott’s work focuses on the relationship between dance, bodies and politics. Strongly identifying as a dancer, she seeks to complicate the boundaries of dance and the place of black female bodies within the form. Her work explores how dance is perceived through the prisms of race, queer culture, gender and class. Zinzi is interested in the space between dance and other art forms, and though her practice is driven through dance, the outcomes range from performance and live art to sound, film, dances and object-based work.

Eva Rowson is an artist and curator. Her work is organised around questions of how we host each other, how we work together, how we build organisations – and the labour and structures that make all of this possible. This research is at the core long-term collaborative projects including ‘Wish you’d been here’, with artist Andrea Francke, examining the types of work and care that enable ’things to happen’, and ‘Como imaginar una musea?’, an evolving and collective Catalan-Spanish-English programme to reimagine the apparatus of the museum from a feminist perspective. She is currently Curator in Residence at Lighthouse, Brighton.

Natasha Cox lives and works in London. She is an artist working with words, performance, photography and space. Her most recent work Després (After) mapped a gathering of bodies on a temporary cave dance floor at the foot of the Monserrat mountains in El Bruc, Catalonia, Spain. She collaborates with others as Co— and is part of School of the Damned (class of 2018).She manages the program at Assembly Point and is an associate member of Supernormal . She co-organises the Open Form platform, and is developing a database of free spaces in London as part of this ongoing project.

Natalie Bell is a passionate community activist and informal educator. She has over 20 years of diverse experience, beginning her career as a volunteer leading on local initiatives. Natalie was the founder director of SE1 United Youth Forum and the successful Threads Fashion programme and works at Coin Street Community Builders.

Irit Rogoff is a writer, teacher, curator and organiser. She is Professor of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths London University, a department she founded in 2002. Rogoff works at the meeting ground between contemporary practices, politics and philosophy. Curatorial projects have included A.C.A.D.E.M.Y  in Hamburg, Antwerp and Eindhoven and “De-Regulation with the work of Kutlug Ataman” (Antwerp, Tel Aviv, Berlin) and “Summit—Non Aligned Positions in education Culture” in Berlin. Rogoff has written extensively on contemporary participatory arts practices and on arts expansions into the social through educational, activist and epistemological incursions.

Andrea Phillips is BALTIC Professor and Director of BxNU Research Institute, Northumbria University & BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. Andrea lectures and writes about the economic and social construction of public value within contemporary art, the manipulation of forms of participation and the potential of forms of political, architectural and social reorganization within artistic and curatorial culture.

Susannah Haslam is a research practitioner and educator working, writing and publishing in the expanded fields of art, design and education. Her current research explores the possibility of new forms of infrastructuring between education, policy and the cultural sector. She is interested in exploring the contemporary conditions and notions of knowledge, alternative education models, work, community, intimacy, technology and space in relation to contemporary art – its worlds and its matrix of discourse – through a written, organisational and dialogic practice. She is currently undertaking a Research Fellowship with Theatrum Mundi, of which this event forms part.

John Bingham-Hall is Director of Theatrum Mundi and Honorary Senior Lecturer at UCL STEaPP. His ongoing research interest is in the ways urban design shapes the public lives of cities, linking study of and through technology, performance, media, and infrastructure. With TM he has led programmes on cultural infrastructure, sonic urbanism, urban commons, and choreographing urban mobility.