Shaping the New Museums’ Future?

Shaping the New Museum's Furure_web_graphic

🗓️ Thursday, April, 10th

  • 🕖 6.30 PM Dublin, Ireland (IST)
  • 🕖 7.30 PM Copenhagen, Denmark (CEST)
  • 🕖 8.30 PM Helsinki, Finland (EEST)
  • 🕖 1.30 PM Toronto, Canada-Ontario (EDT)
  • 🕖 2.30 PM Sao Paulo, Brazil (BRT)

Shaping the New Museums’ Future? Training New Generations of Museum Curators along Sustainable Paths

Abstract:

Art is and will remain a producer of carbon footprint, and so are the museums that display and store it, have offices, cafes and air-conditioned interiors. And at the same time, they are developing their ambitions to educate the public about climate catastrophe awareness and our impact in this regard. How can museums remain more consistent in their narrative and practice? On whom does the more sustainable future of art museums depend? Experiential art and curatorial education formats that shape future contemporary art creators and art institution staff come to the rescue.

Rapid Response Webinars are free of cost for CIMAM members.

Sessions are recorded and posted in CIMAM's Members Only section for those who missed the time.

Guest panelists:

  • Sarah Glennie, Director at National College of Art and Design Dublin, Ireland
  • Dehlia Hannah, Curator and Associate Professor of Environmental Aesthetics in Art History at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Kirsty Robertson, Canada Research Chair in Museums, Art, and Sustainability and Professor and Director of Museum and director of the Centre for Sustainable Curating, Western University, London (ON), Canada

Moderated by CIMAM Board Members, Malgorzata Ludwisiak Ph.D., Museum Management Expert / Freelance Curator / Academic Teacher, Warsaw, Poland and Leevi Haapala, Dean, The Academy of Fine Arts and Former Kiasma Museum Director.

Biographies:

Sarah Glennie

Professor Sarah Glennie is Director of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland.

She is a distinguished leader in the arts in Ireland and internationally, working professionally in the cultural realm for twenty years, with extensive experience of directing and working in a number of public cultural institutions in both Ireland and Britain.

Prior to NCAD she was Director of The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2012-2015) and previously as Director of the Irish Film Institute (IFI) (2008-2012), where she oversaw a major redevelopment programme. At both organisations she developed new programmatic and organisational strategies that led to significant audience growth and greater financial sustainability. Among other roles, she was also Artistic Director of the Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo (2005-2008), Commissioner of Ireland's participation in the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 and Curator with the Henry Moore Foundation Contemporary Project where she curated many other notable visual art projects, both in Ireland and internationally, including Romantic Detachment at PSI MOMA in 2004 and Stopover at the Venice Biennale in 2003. Her curatorial experience includes exhibitions and projects by Olafur Eliasson, Dorothy Cross, Paul McCarthy, Duncan Campbell, Jaki Irvine, Tacita Dean and Isabel Nolan amongst many others. In 2018 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Bristol in recognition of her contribution to the arts.

The National College of Art and Design offers the largest range of Art and Design degrees in Ireland at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and is the only Irish university institution specialising in Art and Design.

Dehlia Hannah

Dehlia Hannah is a curator and Associate Professor of Environmental Aesthetics in Art History at the University of Copenhagen. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from Columbia University, with specialisations in aesthetics and the philosophy of science. Her research and curatorial practice focus on contemporary artistic engagements with emerging science and technology, as well as cultural responses to environmental crisis. She is editor of the Routledge Handbook of Art and Science and Technology Studies (Routledge, 2021) with Rogers et al., A Year Without a Winter (Columbia University Press, 2019), Blackout: A Manifesto’ (e-flux Architecture, 2024), among numerous books and essays. Exhibitions include Placing the Golden Spike: Landscapes of the Anthropocene (2015), Fabian Knecht—Der Weg des größten Widerstandes (2022), Julian Charrière—Controlled Burn (2022-23) and Troika—Pink Noise (2024) & Buenavista (2025). Her forthcoming monograph Rewilding the Museum (Hatje Cantz, 2026) considers the museum as a site of restoration ecology and cultural transformation. In Spring 2025 she is a fellow at the Center for Applied Ecological Thinking in Copenhagen, where she is developing plans for an arts festival to take place during a power failure.

Kirsty Robertson

Kirsty Robertson is Canada Research Chair in Museums, Art, and Sustainability and Professor and Director of Museum and Curatorial Studies in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University where she also directs the Centre for Sustainable Curating (CSC). Robertson has published widely on activism, visual culture and museums, culminating in her book Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Museums, Culture (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). Her new work focuses on small and micro- collections that repurpose traditional museum formats for critical and politically radical projects. A book titled Countering the Museum: The Non-Institution as a Site for Activism is in preparation for the Museums in Focus Series (Routledge). Robertson is a founding member of the Synthetic Collective, a group of artists, scientists and cultural researchers working on plastics pollution in the Great Lakes Region and project co-lead on A Museum for Future Fossils, an ongoing “vernacular museum” that responds curatorially to ecological crisis.

Recommended readings:

Current exhibition: Troika—Buenavista, Schirn Kunsthalle

https://www.schirn.de/en/schirnmag/bald-in-der-schirn-troika-buenavista/

Current research:

Blackout: A Manifesto, e-Flux Architecture (2024)

https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/after-comfort/630497/blackout-a-manifesto/

Recent Exhibition:

Julian Charriere—Controlled Burn, Langen Foundation, 2022-23, curated by Dehlia Hannah & Nadim Samman. (Introduction to the exhibition & catalogue) Kirsty Robertson and Eugenia Kisin. “Museum for Future Fossils: On Curating Ecological Crisis in a Vernacular Museum.” Journal of Curatorial Studies 12.2 (October 2023), 232-256:

https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/jcs_00094_1

Kirsty Robertson, Heather Davis, Kelly Wood, Tegan Moore, Kelly Jazvac/Synthetic Collective. “Plastic Heart, Surface All the Way Through.” Open Library of the Humanities Journal, Art/Switch editorial team, 9.2:

https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/9210/

Centre for Sustainable Curating. Using the Resources at Hand: Sustainable Exhibition Design, a living document resource guide for students and artists, version 5, 2024:

http://sustainablecurating.ca/using-the-resources-at-hand-sustainable-exhibition-design/

Centre for Sustainable Curating and Synthetic Collective. Objects as Temporal Entities, ongoing project begun as part of The Sustainable Institution, LUMA Arles, 2024:

http://sustainablecurating.ca/exhibitions-and-projects/objects-as-temporal-entities/

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CIMAM 2025 Rapid Response Webinars are made possible with the support from the Getty Foundation through its Connecting Professionals/Sharing Expertise initiative.