Nora Sternfeld - Professor for art education, HFBK Hamburg
Collections as Commons
The history of public collections is often told in museology in connection with the French Revolution. In the Louvre, something substantial actually happened in relation to the ownership of objects. The representative things of the nobility and the church became public in the revolutionary museum - which went back to an expropriation, to an appropriation of the collections for the general public. Whereas until then they had served to represent the power of the nobles, the king and the church, they were now socialized. In this process, the objects underwent a change of meaning, a revolutionary de- and recontextualization. Since then, we have assumed that public museums and their collections are not only simply there for everyone, but also belong to everyone.
In the case of the Louvre, then, the public sphere and property cannot be thought of separately. In the neoliberal present, however – I would argue that the public sphere is increasingly separated from property and thus emptied and expropriated. In everyday language, for example, we take it almost for granted that private collections, private archives, or research centers can be public. But if we assume, with modern museum history, that a proper public has something to do with common ownership and not only with access, then this is actually a contradiction in terms. The private is not public. This is particularly virulent because, for the last twenty years or so, the public character of institutions has been increasingly eroded - they have been privatized out of hand - while at the same time, incidentally, talk of "public spaces" and "public programs" has been booming. In the first part of my lecture, I address problematizations and responsibilities that come with public ownership, and I address one aspect of problematic privatizations: contemporary museum practices of digitization. And just as with material things, there is no reason why digital objects or digitised material should not belong to everyone. From there I will propose to think about the commoning of collections, of institutional formats and of education.
Nora Sternfeld is an art educator and curator. She is professor for art education at the HFBK Hamburg. From 2018 to 2020 she was documenta professor at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. From 2012 to 2018 she was Professor of Curating and Mediating Art at Aalto University in Helsinki. In addition, she is co-director of the /ecm - Master Course for Exhibition Theory and Practice at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, in the core team of schnittpunkt. austellungstheorie & praxis, co-founder and partner of trafo.K, Office for Education, Art and Critical Knowledge Production (Vienna) and since 2011 part of freethought, Platform for Research, Education and Production (London). In this context she was also one of the artistic directors of the Bergen Assembly 2016 and is since 2020 BAK Fellow, basis voor actuele kunst (Utrecht). She publishes on contemporary art, educational theory, exhibitions, historical politics and anti-racism.
CAS / MAS Curating
The Postgraduate Programme in Curating (CAS / MAS Curating) is an international, English speaking, postgraduate part-time programme founded in 2005. It is conceived of as a discursive platform which imparts key areas of contemporary exhibition-making, knowledge production and curating by praxis-oriented project work. We understand curating as an activity and as an agency, as an interdisciplinary work process.
https://www.zhdk.ch/weiterbildung/vermittlung-und-kontext-525/cas-curating