The activist museum: going deeper
25 November 2024
8pm EET (Athens) | 7pm CET (Brussels) | 6pm WET (Lisbon)
The conversation will take place in English.
Participation is free. Please register here
Recent conferences in Europe such as “Heritage, Museums and Populism” (CHAPTER, Berlin, 7-9 October) or “Can we talk? Museums facing populism” (NEMO, Sibiu, 10-12 November) are a clear sign that museums need to acknowledge the challenges they face in the political environment in which the operate, identify and register the form these challenges take and be prepared to deal with them, considering also the support they need to give to museum professionals. Recent incidents involving artists and the performing arts (made known through the European Theatre Convention) are a reminder that museums are never alone in their struggle.
Julia Leser is one of the researchers in the project CHAPTER – Challenging Populist Truth-Making in Europe: The Role of Museums in a Digital ‘Post-Truth’ European Society. She will share with us some of the findings related to museums in Germany, Poland and the UK. Julia is also one of the founders of Halt!ung Network, which aims to register incidents compromising the freedom of museums and museum professionals and to support these professionals.
Goranka Horjan has been following these somehow cyclic developments as a museum professional and currently as Chair of INTERCOM – ICOM International Committee for Museum Management. INTERCOM and CIMAM – International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art have launched the Museum Watch Government Management Project, which pays attention to reported practices in several European countries of increasing political interference in museum management, thereby reducing the autonomy of museums in professional decision-making.
Jana Golombek will share with us the experience of the LWL-Museum Zeche Zollern in Dortmund with populist/far-right attacks on the occasion of the exhibition project “Das ist kolonial”, in 2023. The preceding exhibition workshop and the exhibition centre around the question “What does colonialism have to do with us?”. The current exhibition explores the region’s historical connections to colonialism in the areas of trade, industry, mission, research, everyday life, memory culture, propaganda, resistance, etc., through historical material, objects, biographies, interviews and artistic interventions in order to show the colonial continuities that still affect us today.
Bionotes
Goranka Horjan is the director of the national museum Dvor Trakošćan (Croatia), with a significant experience in EU projects and with more than 25 years in museum management as CEO of several national museums. She was also Assistant Minister of Culture of Croatia. She is an art historian with PhD in information and communication sciences. As member of ICOM since 1997, she has held different positions in different committees, currently being Chair of INTERCOM. From 2012 to 2017 she was the President of the Board of Trustees of the European Museum Forum, in charge of the most prestigious museum award scheme in Europe, including European Museum of the Year Award and Council of Europe Museum Prize. She is also a member of ICOMOS and Interpret Europe.
Jana Golombek works as an associate researcher and senior curator at the LWL-Museum Zeche Zollern in Dortmund. She has curated exhibitions on the cultural history of the Ruhr focusing on migration, the impacts of deindustrialization and the social history of the workers. She is the project coordinator of the current exhibition “Das ist kolonial”. She is a co-investigator in the research project “Deindustrialization and the politics of our time” (DéPOT). Previously she was a researcher at the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum and a research associate at the German Mining Museum.
Julia Leser is a political scientist and works at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin as coordinator of the research project ‘Challenging Populist Truth-Making in Europe: The Role of Museums in a Digital “Post-Truth” European Society’ (Volkswagen Foundation). She is also co-founder and co-chair of the ‘Netzwerk Halt!ung’, a network initiative in Germany that supports museums and their employees who are exposed to far-right hostility, and raises awareness about anti-democratic attacks on museums and museum work.