What's the relation between a collection and a museum?
29 October 2025. CIMAM is running a global advocacy campaign in support of the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA), addressing the critical political decisions that threaten to remove its collection and downgrade the institution to a Kunsthalle.
We initiated this effort to gather strong arguments and demonstrate solidarity with M HKA and other museums that may face similar forms of vulnerability in other parts of the world.
CIMAM calls on its Members to raise their voices in defense of museum collections and share their views by responding to two key questions.
- Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
- What are the ethical and governance risks when political authorities seek to reallocate or remove a museum’s collection?
Format of Contributions
Participants may submit their contributions to museumwatch@cimam.org and communication@cimam.org
* A short-written statement (100 words)
Deadline
CIMAM will collect responses from 29 October - 12 December. and publish contributions daily through its website and social media channels, highlighting key quotes and voices to maintain visibility and engagement throughout the campaign. All materials will be centralized in a dedicated Museum Watch resource page, ensuring continued access and amplifying the collective message of international solidarity.
On 9 October, CIMAM published the Museum Watch article - M HKA caught in the crosshairs: what is the museum’s future? expressing support for M HKA and outlining the circumstances that threaten the very foundations of its mission as an internationally respected contemporary art museum.
As outlined in the article, the Flemish government's interference undermines the core Definition of a Museum, as established by ICOM:
“A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. ”
Stripping a museum of its collection not only compromises its institutional integrity but also puts in danger its historical, cultural, and civic connection with its community.
CIMAM has opened a dedicated resource page on its website to gather related coverage and advocacy efforts - including articles condemning the decision, such as the one published by L’Internationale, and a petition calling to reverse the decision to abolish M HKA's status as a national museum.
This case raises an urgent question that can affect museums worldwide:
What is the relation between a collection and a museum?
Find below the contributions from the CIMAM Community:
- Shihoko Iida, Independent Curator, Head of Curatorial, Aichi Triennale 2025, Nagoya, Japan
- Doreen Mende, Curator, Writer, and Public Scholar, Berlin, Germany
- Manuel Segade, Director, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain
- Shruti Ramlingaiah, Curator, Researcher, Mumbai, India
- Frank Lubbers, Emeritus Curator and Museum Director, Ghent, Belgium
- Barbara Vanderlinden, Curator and Art Historian, Helsinki, Finland
- Dominick A Maia Tanner, Curator, Luanda, Angola
- Pedro de Llano Neira, University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
- Aprille P. Tijam, Associate Director and Head of Exhibitions and Collections, Ayala Museum,
- Makati City, Philippines
- María José Lemaitre, Director; and Caroll Yasky, Curator and Head of Collection, Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago, Chile
- Saara Hacklin, Chief Curator, Collections (PhD), KIASMA, Museum of Contemporary Art,
- Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, Finland
- John Kenneth Paranada, Curator of Art and Climate Change, Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
- Amanda Ariawan, Curator, Art Writer, Indonesia
- Älima Qairat, Artistic director, Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture, Almaty, Kazakhstan
- Dr. Raphael Gygax, Art Historian / Curator Locarno, Switzerland
- Georges Petitjean, Curator, Fondation OPALE, Lens, Switzerland
- Senka Ibrisimbegovic, University of Sarajevo, Faculty of Architecture, Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Laura Barreca, Prof. History of Contemporary Art, Academy of Fine Arts, Catania, Italy
- Talia Mzamane, Collections Administrator, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South África
- Suzana Sousa, Independent Curator, Luanda, Angola
- Maria Eugenia Cordero, General Director, Museo Barda del Desierto | mBDD, Northern Patagonia, Argentina
- Mireia Massagué, Director, Museo Chillida Leku, Hernani, Gipuzkoa, Spain
- Ruchika Jain, Curator, Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, India
- Portia Placino, Curator and Writer, Manila, Philippines
- Rein Wolfs, Director, Stedelijk Museum Ámsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
Because collections serve as a source of spiritual anchorage for citizens and local communities, they enable people to preserve their dignity and humanity in their daily lives and during times of crisis. By building collections, we can pass on the histories and cultures of our regions to future generations, fostering an understanding of where we came from, the community we have become, and the future we shall build.
What are the ethical and governance risks when political authorities seek to reallocate or remove a museum’s collection?
Public collections are funded by citizens' taxes and public funds; they therefore belong to the citizens, not political authorities. For political authorities to reallocate or remove a museum’s collection would constitute an abuse of power and an attack on citizens' sovereignty and would be an act contrary to democracy. There is also an extremely serious risk that this could deprive citizens and local communities of their history and culture, resulting in a loss of cultural identity and civic pride.
Shihoko Iida
Independent Curator
Head of Curatorial, Aichi Triennale 2025
Nagoya, Aichi, Japan
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
Collections are archives of languages, memories, material culture, and people. Their objects create cultural heritage like material witnesses of passing times, containing all possible futures. They are invaluable treasures like those still lost in the Louvre heist that have been contemporary art and culture at their moment of making. They are subjects, characters, interlocutors, and companions to wonder and wander. They are even capable of soothing and transforming pain from colonial injustice as knowledge between geographies and generations.
What are the ethical and governance risks when political authorities seek to reallocate or remove a museum’s collection?
Across all political systems, collections signal an understanding of a world that takes reality more seriously than the interpretations imposed upon them,’ said the curator and director Annaliese Mayer-Meintschel at Dresden National Art Collections in 1984 during the time of the repressive one-party system of state-socialism in the East of Germany. Collections are the backbones, the unconscious, the multiple realities, the futures of society… Removing them from contemporary access to everyone is like shutting down a public library.
Doreen Mende
Curator, Writer, and Public Scholar
Berlin, Germany
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
To collect is a situated practice: it depends on a place and context, like botanical species. Their DNA changes from place to place, like the one of the people who support them. Collections are all different because they respond to different questions and their histories are interwined with ways of building them, absolutely idiosyncratic. In the most superficial or practical way, they are thought for the conditions a museum building can offer. In the deepest way of thinking a collection, reflects the historical conditions of production and the narratives structuring the culture of a given place. To think otherwise is to neglect the productivity of a city as a cultural field, to neglect its consistency as a community.
What are the ethical and governance risks when political authorities seek to reallocate or remove a museum’s collection?
It is not even a risk: it is a catastrophe. To question the belonging of a collection is to question the museum as an institution that is an effect of a community. Museums are the machines that give definitions of a society. To remove a collection means to destroy that social pact that culture constitutes by itself. In a region extremely sensitive to colonial processes throughout history, it is of the foremost importance to recognise that to reallocate a collection echoes long past times of European extractivism.
Manuel Segade
Director
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Madrid, Spain
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
A collection is vital to a museum—a rhizome that connects and contributes through curatorial and educational logics to art and history, but, foremost, one that threads culture, society, and minds. To displace, reallocate, or hinder a collection is to sever these threads, destabilising the museum’s integrity and its relationship with the communities, publics and histories it represents. Such acts risk turning custodianship into control, eroding the ethical foundations of care, access, and shared cultural memory.
Shruti Ramlingaiah
Curator, Researcher
Mumbai, India
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
A museum’s collection is its soul and its memory. To deaccession is to amputate part of its identity under the illusion of progress. History shows that every purge born of a shift in curatorial perspective, art-historical valuation, or political delusion of the day ends in regret and costly repair. The same blindness now drives the Flemish government’s idea of merging the collections of M HKA and SMAK: it would dissolve distinct voices into a single, tasteless stew. A museum that forgets its own past has already deaccessioned itself.
Frank Lubbers
Emeritus Curator and Museum Director
Ghent, Belgium
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
M HKA, Memory, and the Global Provenance Debate
A museum lives through its collection, not its walls. Its works carry memory, meaning, and life—whether the public sees them or not. Think of Lascaux: sealed for millennia, yet still fully alive through its paintings. In contemporary art, the artists themselves are the first and foremost moral stakeholders: their authority over their works persists regardless of whether the pieces have been purchased, gifted, or acquired by a museum. M HKA’s holdings are rooted in Antwerp and its artist community—most strikingly embodied in Gordon Matta‑Clark’s Office Baroque (1977), which literally cut through all five floors of a building. This radical intervention, grounded in the city yet resonating universally, laid the symbolic and practical foundation for the museum: an institution inseparable from both its local civic context and the experimental energy of the artists it champions. The decision by Flemish Minister of Culture Caroline Gennez to relocate the collection to Ghent signals a radical re‑organisation of the museum landscape in Flanders, one that threatens to sever the M HKA collection from its civic, historical, and cultural context—impoverishing the life of both the art and the communities from which it emerged. As the debate over African heritage shows, a museum can only truly live when collections and place are protected together.
Barbara Vanderlinden
Curator and Art Historian
Helsinki, Finland
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
From an Angolan perspective, a museum’s collection is not merely a set of objects - it is the living memory of a people, a mirror of our resilience, creativity, and multiplicity. In a country still reconstructing its cultural institutions after years of conflict from a war of liberation followed by two civil wars, collections ground museums in continuity and belonging. They give shape to stories that might otherwise disappear, anchoring each museum to its community and territory. To remove a collection is to sever that vital connection between art, people, and place - to erase the very dialogue through which culture heals and renews itself.
What are the ethical and governance risks when political authorities seek to reallocate or remove a museum’s collection?
When political authorities interfere with collections, the ethical and governance risks are profound. From Angola’s own experience during the colonial period, we know how fragile cultural heritage becomes when power eclipses stewardship. The reallocation or removal of a museum’s collection compromises institutional independence, weakens public trust, and risks turning memory into propaganda. It transforms the museum from a civic space of reflection into an instrument of control. True cultural governance must safeguard collections as collective property - beyond political cycles - ensuring that they remain free, accessible, and accountable to the communities they represent.
Dominick A Maia Tanner
Curator
Luanda, Angola
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
Museums are context-based and transgenerational projects. The collection is the platform which facilitates conversations among those who preceded us and those who will arrive in the future: whoever they are and no matter what language they´ll speak. It´s the primary source of activity in the museum. Collections help to inscribe communities and individuals into History, but also into histories and stories, in a critical way. Without a collection, there is no museum. When a collection is removed or relocated a community loses this form of shared memory, which unfolds and exists in the space through art objects.
Pedro de Llano Neira
University of Santiago de Compostela
Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
Collections are the collective voices and soul of the people—their history and the cultures they represent—permanently held in trust by a museum. Through the museum’s stewardship of its collections, sustained dialogues between communities, both local and international, are made possible via exhibitions, loan exchanges, audience engagement programs (onsite and online), publications, and more.
When these collections are removed from a museum, it poses a high risk of diminishing the representation of these voices in public institutions, missing the opportunity for museums and collections to serve as constant and safe spaces for convergence that is accessible to all, and limiting opportunities to connect and reconnect different generations with their history and culture.
Aprille P. Tijam
Associate Director and Head of Exhibitions and Collections
Ayala Museum
Makati City, Philippines
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
Collections are the driving force behind the identity of museums and their communities. Individually and collectively, the works that comprise them respond to a mission defined by those who constitute the museum. The collection amplifies the message that each institution conveys in the community that welcomes them and establishes an emotional bond of cultural belonging and irreplaceable collective memory that is built up over time, generation after generation.
The workers of the MSSA, an art museum that survived Chile's civil-military coup and 20 long years of exile, stand in solidarity with the M HKA team and call on those responsible not to intervene authoritatively and to protect the communion and indivisibility of its collection.
María José Lemaitre
Director
Caroll Yasky
Curator and Head of Collection
Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende
Santiago, Chile
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
Through the collection, the museum is intrinsically linked to the history of its region and the public. Like the museum itself, the collection is always rooted in a specific time and place, reflecting the history, values, and interests of that specific region. Not only is the professional knowledge of the institution linked to the collections, but the collections can also be seen as reflecting the memory of the local community, to be fostered and re-interpreted by new generations of the public.
What are the ethical and governance risks when political authorities seek to reallocate or remove a museum’s collection?
When political authorities remove or reallocate a museum’s collection, they sever a vital link to the cultural heritage of a region. Museums are understood to serve their communities, and collections are central to that mission. In a new context, critical questions arise: To whom does the collection speak in a new context? How is its value redefined? Such actions risk undermining the museum’s integrity, eroding public trust, and disrupting the ethical stewardship of cultural memory.
Saara Hacklin
Chief Curator, Collections (PhD)
KIASMA
Museum of Contemporary Art
Finnish National Gallery
Helsinki, Finland
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
Collections are the museum’s evidence base and social contract with the public. They anchor scholarship in place, sustain intergenerational memory, and permit communities to test narratives against objects and time. Removing or reallocating a collection breaches fiduciary stewardship, weakens arm’s-length governance, and harms cultural rights. It stifles curatorial independence, distorts research priorities, and narrows access. Such interference contradicts ICOM-aligned principles of permanence, care, interpretation, and public service. Antwerp is a warning, not an exception. M HKA’s collection must remain in public trust: intact, catalogued, accessible, and lawfully governed for today’s citizens and those not yet born.
John Kenneth Paranada
Curator of Art and Climate Change
Sainsbury Centre
University of East Anglia
Norwich, UK
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor their relationship with communities and place?
A museum is an echo chamber that holds the uneven, fragile, and often uncomfortable narratives that communities fight to keep visible.
Protecting collections is therefore an ethical obligation: it advocates for continuity, accountability, and the public's right to remember, question, and imagine otherwise.
Amanda Ariawan
Curator | Art Writer
Indonesia,
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
Museum collections are the core of an institution’s identity and integrity. They preserve cultural memory, enable critical reflection, and create long-term commitments between a museum and its public. Tselinny center of contemporary culture, Almaty and M HKA, Antwerp is in long-term partnership for the joint Şağylys collection, which demonstrates why collections matter deeply, especially presenting Central Asian artistic scene. It ensure that the region’s artistic voices are documented, researched, and presented within an international institutional framework. Such collections anchor museums in their communities by safeguarding histories that might otherwise remain fragmented or invisible. They provide continuity, foster trust, and form an essential foundation for cultural dialogue across borders.
Älima Qairat
Artistic director
Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture
Almaty, Kazakhstan
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
Collections are the backbone of a museum; they can be understood as the skeleton around which the limbs, organs, veins, skin and hair are arranged. Without a collection, a museum is a plucked art gallery... Oh dear! When collections can simply be sold off or incorporated into other institutions as a result of political decisions, a community not only loses its visual archive, the history of the institution as told through objects – no, trust in the institution itself also dwindles: museums often benefit from donations or very favourable acquisitions prices because it can be assumed that an entry into a collection is FOREVER. When a collection is removed, not only is the identity of the institution at risk, but also this financial advantage on the market.
Fanni Fetzer
Direktorin
Kunstmuseum Luzern
Luzern, Switzerland
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
For me, collections form the core of a museum’s identity because they reflect the long-term commitments, responsibilities, and relationships that define our work. As a curator, I see how collections generate dialogue, foster critical thinking, and build trust over time. When we protect and thoughtfully (re)interpret them, we reinforce the museum’s integrity and its public mission. Defending collections means defending the cultural and civic role museums play in society.
Dr. Raphael Gygax
Art Historian / Curator
Locarno, Switzerland
The MuHKA as a museum, an exhibition space and a keeping place for art, is an integral part of the city of Antwerp and its identity as a cultural capital, past, present and future. The museum and its collection is particularly important in this city precisely with its immense cultural past to continue this rich artistic and cultural heritage on an international level. Such a place is part of the social, cultural and economic tissue of one of the most important ports in Europe, in which migration was and is always present, and assures international relevance in the area of contemporary arts practice.
MuHKA was the first museum of contemporary art in Belgium. Its collection was thoughtfully assembled over a period of many decades and reflects the cultural hub that Antwerp is. Antwerp boasts many significant museums, commercial and non-commercial art galleries and art spaces, and of course a world renowned art academy, and is a high capital of fashion.
To take away from MuHKA the status of museum, and removing and reallocating its collection, nothing less than shortsighted and detrimental to the cultural radiance of Antwerp.
Georges Petitjean
Curator
Fondation OPALE
Lens, Switzerland
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
Collections are fundamental to a museum’s identity because they embody its intellectual, cultural, and ethical foundations. They provide continuity over time, anchoring the institution’s mission in a clearly defined set of values, narratives, and curatorial commitments. A collection gives the museum integrity by establishing professional responsibilities in care, interpretation, and public accountability. For communities, collections function as shared cultural memory—offering points of identification, dialogue, and learning. They also root the museum in place by reflecting local histories and connecting them to broader artistic or societal contexts, enabling the museum to serve as both a cultural steward and a civic actor.
For Ars Aevi and Sarajevo, the Collection is the core of the museum’s identity and legitimacy. Formed during the siege through international solidarity, it embodies the city’s cultural resilience and positions the museum as a symbol of collective memory and artistic continuity. The Collection anchors Ars Aevi’s relationship with communities because it was created for—and donated to—the citizens of Sarajevo, generating a strong sense of shared ownership. At the same time, it connects Sarajevo to global cultural networks. By circulating through public spaces and institutions, the Collection activates the city as an open museum, shaping urban identity and future cultural development.
Senka Ibrisimbegovic
University of Sarajevo
Faculty of Architecture
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
A sense of urgency and opportunity prompts us to reconsider the role of museums, particularly in their relationship with collections, audiences, moving beyond the extractive logic of consumption and mass tourism. Other goals must now be pursued, and new methodologies invested in. Transforming the museum means embracing an experimental, horizontal, and pedagogical dimension—one that brings institutions closer to communities, with the ambition of becoming credible interlocutors for people. Initiatives should actively involve local stakeholders —students and teachers, civic associations, artists and creatives, private citizens, and communities— diversifying audiences and engagement methods. The goal is to promote a model that reactivates heritage in a horizontal way. Museum are places of lived experience, where new forms of relationship and “citizen science” where radical, ecological, pedagogical practices can be explored.
Laura Barreca
Prof. History of Contemporary Art
Academy of Fine Arts,
Catania, Italy
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
Collections are the foundation of a museum’s identity because they define what the institution is, what it values, and the stories it is entrusted to tell. They uphold integrity by anchoring exhibitions, research, and education in authentic, responsibly stewarded objects. Through collections, museums fulfil their public mission to preserve heritage, produce knowledge, and foster learning. They sustain relationships with communities by reflecting lived histories, affirming cultural memory, and creating spaces for dialogue, representation, and belonging—tying people meaningfully to place, past, and future.
Talia Mzamane
Collections Administrator
Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa
Cape Town, South Africa
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
I believe that historically we learned to tie museums to collections and these became the bedrock of the museum identity shaping its mission and programs. It nurtures the colonial concept of a cabinet of curiosities making culture fixed in objects created by specific communities, time and circumstances. However, as a knowledge space the museum can grow and engage with communities beyond collections creating a place for experience and wonder, a space that engages with art and culture from movement and creativity, where people are not only defined by historical products and fixed ideals. Such a museum would mimic the flux of culture and art and explore beyond the limits of an object-based collection.
Suzana Sousa
Independent Curator,
Luanda, Angola.
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
At the Museo Barda del Desierto, we understand the collection as a living bond between artwork, territory, and community. In our case, the collection transcends the physical object: it is composed of geolocated works, site-specific artistic practices, and experiences that unfold in direct dialogue with the Patagonian landscape.
Although our anchoring is territorial, the collection is also global: it brings together artists from different geographies who, when working at the mBDD, assume an immersive commitment to the cultural, political, and ecological context of the territory. They integrate themselves temporarily into it, producing works that emerge from their encounter with the place, its memory, and its communities.
In this way, the collection sustains the museum’s identity because it embodies an ethical and aesthetic position that combines the local with global dialogues within a framework of ecological responsibility. In a context historically affected by extractive processes, the collection acts as a critical gesture: it restores value, attention, and sensitivity to the territory in which it is inscribed.
From this perspective, and considering a holistic understanding of museum collections worldwide, the integrity of museums is supported by practices of care enacted through public action, involving not only the conservation of artworks but also the stewardship of each territory, its ecosystems, and its communities. Collections thus become a bridge between the local and its identity within the global community, between art and life, between the landscape and those who inhabit it.
Maria Eugenia Cordero
General Director
Museo Barda del Desierto | mBDD
Northern Patagonia
Argentina
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
Collections are integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission because they embody a long-term commitment of care. Beyond their material value, collections hold accumulated knowledge, memory, and responsibility, linking past, present, and future. Caring for a collection means preserving not only objects, but also the relationships they generate with artists, places, and communities. Through sustained care, collections anchor museums to their territory, landscape, and social context, fostering trust and continuity. They provide a stable yet living framework from which museums can engage the public, enable reinterpretation, and act as custodians of cultural meaning rooted in place.
Mireia Massagué
Director
Museo Chillida Leku
Hernani, Gipuzkoa
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
Collections are an integral part of the Museum as they embody the institution’s purpose, activate the space and create a vital bridge between museums and the communities they serve. Far from being mere remnants of the past, collections hold transformative power. As Walter Benjamin (1936) states, objects possess an “aura”, one that is not static but continually evolving as they move through changing political, social, and cultural contexts. These objects, with their layered histories, when placed in different settings, from exhibitions to educational and outreach programs, opens up new possibilities for interpretation and allows multiple readings to coexist. Through these interactions, collections become catalysts for dialogue, inviting communities to reflect, question, and connect.
To strip a museum of its collection is to erase the very reason it exists, because over time the collection not only mirrors the shifting values and understandings of the communities around it but also becomes part of people’s memories and collective identity.
Ruchika Jain
Curator
Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum
Mumbai, India
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
Museum collections are vital to collective identity, presenting artistic and cultural expressions while embodying complex histories. Objects carry the layered memories of communities and society, including narratives often absent from official accounts. They serve as anchors, enabling people to encounter and reflect on histories that are multifaceted, personal, and sometimes difficult. Over time, collections can become a basis for rethinking unwritten or disavowed contexts, fostering ownership and accountability. By safeguarding and interpreting these works, museums nurture dialogue, understanding, and connection across generations, positioning themselves as spaces where memory, identity, and advocacy converge. M HKA's collection should remain as their public trust and responsibility.
Portia Placino
Curator and Writer
Manila, Philippines
Why are collections integral to a museum’s identity, integrity, and public mission, and how do they anchor its relationship with communities and place?
Collections are the raison d’être for those particular entities that we call museums. Museum collections grow, will grow and have grown over time, wordlessly writing and commenting the unwritten histories and stories of communities and being rooted in broader local societies. Public collections are a perfect example of shared ownership, with different owners representing different opinions – they are essential for the identities of the museums and their heterogenic owners, the public. Building and curating a collection is a highly responsible form of constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing the self-image and self-esteem and self-critique of these publics, these changing communities. Having grown and growing amidst local communities, international collections develop into metaphors for the interconnectivity between local communities and a globalized world. Let them grow and continuously redefine their owners' understanding of this world.
Rein Wolfs
Director
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Please help us protect collections and the integrity of museums around the world by identifying other cases here:
https://cimam.org/museum-watch/contribute-musuem-watch/