Presentation: ZKM

As part of the reflexive research program accompanying the exhibition The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds After 1989. I participated in a workshop screening of Museum Futures: Distributed.

The screening was followed by a lively discussion on the future of museums, art and its markets, the financial crisis, the forces of globalisation, techno-city and much else besides.

Globalization as a phase in the geo-political transformation of the world is at once a transformation of art – of the conditions of its production, and possibilities of its diffusion and dissemination and presence.

At the same time, artists, and above all the institutions of art, are faced with the questions as to the extent to which the concept global can and must be thought – and how this reflects back on its own methods of working.

The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds After 1989 examines the way in which globalization, both with its pervasive mechanisms of the market and its utopias of networking and generosity, impacts upon the various spheres of artistic production and reception.

A critical analysis of the key institutions of the art world seeks to illustrate the manner in which globalization has both shaped and itself become a theme in artistic production that intentionally creates and reviews its own conditions of possibility.

With The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds After 1989 at ZKM Karlsruhe, imagines itself as a utopian factory a place in which local experiences of time subvert the unity of the new universal time.

One of the integral aspects of the exhibition is its self-reflective dimension.

In a specially organized artist-in-residence program more than twelve international artists discuss the issues surrounding the project, and help to throw critical light on the exhibition’s concepts.

This critical discussion will take place in the studio inside the exhibition space in which visitors, mediators and artists realize artistic-educative projects, workshops and temporary presentations, and thus together help shape and co-author.

Lastly, the critical, scholarly discourse initiated at the inception of the research project Global Art and the Museum (GAM) will be pursued throughout the course of the exhibition before being published in a comprehensive catalog.

7pm Thursday 6th October 2011
Studio, 1st floor
ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art
Karlsruhe, Germany

Museum Futures: Distributed - a machinima record of the centenary interview with Moderna Museet’s executive Ayan Lindquist in June 2058. It explores a genealogy for contemporary art practice and its institutions, by re-imagining the role of artists, museums, galleries, markets, manufactories and academies.

The project was a collaboration with Marysia Lewandowska, commissioned by Moderna Museet Stockholm, Sweden, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary in 2008.

Visit the credits and screening page

Related projects include Self Portrait: Arnolfini a text about Utopoly, or the Live Tracing research or A Joy Forever