Daryna Yakymova

The CIMAM 2018 Annual Conference was devoted to The Museum in Transition. This conference opened a very important professional discussion of how museums can shape and create the relevant values today.

Today all the cultural institutions feel the influence of globalization and society changes on the development of a museum as a sociocultural institution, which is experiencing a lot of changes in its content and forms of activity. Losing the image of the “temple of art and science”, the museum is increasingly perceived as a space in continuous development.

For me, this conference was a form of institutional critique, the practice that could be a tool for reconsideration museums activity, the attempt to think of a museum as an instrument that analyzes itself.

During the conference, speakers analyzed the challenges of time and the role of the museum which has the ability to translate and interpret human values into a personal format in the era of global changes.

As a team member of a working group of the future museum of contemporary art in Ukraine, we consider the museum as the form of a transitional institutional model as a resource of development of culture in

new socio-politics conditions.

Contemporary museum is not only about a beautiful museum building now, but it is also about the professional work of the curators and the problem of historicization with which they deal.

The speakers said about the necessity to bring your own experience into the global dialogue with other institutions and to understand what our own symbolic capital is, how it is connected with local traditions and with the international context.

In Ukraine art has always been in a marginal position in relation to Western art. We still have more in common with the Post-Soviet countries of Eastern Europe than with the West, despite the fact that

everyone now has different political systems.

It is necessary to define the role of the museum - not a universal, but a museum in a specific situation: what can they do for their society and at the same time how can they support international dialogue?

A very interesting question put the director of the National Museum of Stockholm Susanna Pettersson: to whom should serve the museums today? And then she gave a fundamental answer: for ART!

And I completely agree. Serving art is the most important reason why museums exist today and will exist tomorrow.