Sona Hovhannisyan

The most complicated thing is to try shortly speak about 3 days long conference which somehow affected you in so many different ways. But I will try to separate the points that was especially interesting and productive for my professional experience during the CIMAM’s 2015 Annual Conference in Tokyo.

Applying for the conference I was very interested in how in modern society, where we have a huge range of tools as galleries, art fairs, private collections and auction houses, they reflected on relationship between art and public. As well being the member of ICOM and CIMAM, me and ICOM Armenia was very exciting to see in person the essential contribution of the biggest international community of contemporary art museum professionals and intellectuals represented by CIMAM.

In spite that the art world changes very fast and in the very various ways we cannot ignore the fact that the museums are still remain one of the key places where new ideas and possibilities can enter society, change it or predict its further destiny. And to uncover this topic the conference main theme "how global can museums be?" was determined into three sections during three days. Already the first day perspective put the very best question "were the museums place for debates?". First of all, because in modern society we extremely need the creative and artistic place of debate. Second of all, actually is the answer as well "NO, they never were". And I agree with it.

They weren't not because they couldn't but there was necessity before. The contemporary art changed the condition, becoming self criticized. With my point of view it’s the big challenge to contain and introduce the art which firstly dialogues and fight with itself. At the same time the museums' world can learn a lot of strategies from this becoming self criticized as well, responding to the institutional criticism.

So without any doubt we need museums and we need institutions. And this conference one more time make clear that in spite of differences between contexts, institutions, collections, professional impacts, political and social problems, which are deeply affected art, sometimes, even for a while, preventing its representation (in the example of Palestine), we all wanted to create the universal space for debates were the modern and contemporary art can be constructed.

And this can be possible not only sharing our experience and ideas, but creating common projects and cooperation. This conference helped me to achieve these points, met wonderful open minded professionals and established links, which I am going to use in the best way as I can. And I am sure the further cooperation will be very fruitful and I hope it will give a start for new global conversation.

At last I would like to express my deep gratitude to the Getty Foundation which every year supported young professionals to improve their skills and enlarge their outlook, and this year gave me an incredible chance to attend the CIMAM 2015 conference. And also huge thanks to CIMAM team for a great opportune topic and Mori Art Museum team for their great support in making this possible.