Bhavisha Panchia

Attending the conference provided an opportunity to meet and engage with a number of professionals whose openness and generosity was welcome and appreciated.

The conference introduced me to new thinkers and ideas such as Yuk Hui and the concept of cosmotechnics, including local artistic practices and contexts in the Moderna exhibition, With the Future Behind US, at the Moderna Museet. This show provided a great opportunity for me to engage the shifting social and cultural complexity of Stockholm. Learning about the history of Moderna Museet was particularly interesting for me. Having started to read Kim West’s the Exhibitionary Complex earlier this year, visiting the institution, with introductions by Ann-Sofi Noring and Daniel Birnbaum, including Lars Bang Larson provided a tangible context from which to grasp the ideas presented in the book. The introduction to Iaspis was an additional benefit to extending our professional relationship to working in Swedish artists in the future.

CIMAM’s dedication to supporting the next wave of museum professionals is commendable. Conversations and discussions that arose from travel grantees in particular were inspirational and left me energized to create new spaces for contemporary art practices in Johannesburg and South Africa at large. It is through these networks we can begin to build systems of sharing and collaboration across geographies, in spite of national or economic pressures.

The introduction to initiatives like Museum Watch is important, given the often tumultuous and severe conditions or environments we often have to work in. As suggested during the General Assembly, perhaps Museum Action is a softer, more suitable name that does not come with associations with policing. Initiatives like these are largely unknown, and so it would help to promote it. That said, the structural and operational foundation needs to be reconsidered, particularly when working with situations unfolding in the global South.

The last day of discussions at the General Assembly brought to the fore the prescient conditions and challenges facing museum professionals within the global North. A broader enquiry into smaller/different institutions which operate outside of these cosmopolitan global north centers I felt was missing. This gap could be undertaken in the next CIMAM Annual Conference whose premise is ‘Context’.