"The institution's role has been intellectually driven by the integrity of curatorial voices to present inclusive and diverse platforms"

Suhanya Raffel, CIMAM board member and director of M+ in Hong Kong, explains CIMAM's mission to address and provide spaces for reflection on issues of concern to modern and contemporary art museums, such as climate change, controversy management, inclusion, diversity, and gender equality, among others.

"Among the issues we are grappling with at CIMAM are the climate crisis, highlighted through the pandemic, and the management of the controversy and controversial content. The institution's role has been intellectually driven by the integrity of curatorial voices to present inclusive, diverse platforms that allow for arguments and challenges. So these are integrated perspectives that also, as we look to the future, as we see CIMAM's own body growing across different regions, are the development of a much more complex understanding of canons, whether they come from Africa, Asia, the Global South, and a much more complex challenge in terms of historical response. CIMAM's role in all of this is, on the one hand, to protect the institutions' integrity in various ways, advocating, arguing, and providing forums to think about the institution's role for the public, collections, grants, and publications. But also the extended idea of what gender brings to our profession. We have already seen in our membership that 70% are women, and of that, 63% are women in leadership."

Watch this clip from the webinar "Grow, Reach Out and Reflect," which celebrated CIMAM's 60th anniversary on Wednesday, 6 July 2022: