Mifta Berga Zeleke

In 2022, 41 contemporary art curators, researchers, and museum directors from 24 different countries were awarded to attend the CIMAM 2022 Annual Conference. The CIMAM 2022 Annual Conference, titled "The Attentive Museum. Permeable Practices for a Common Ground", was held in Mallorca (Balearic Islands), Spain on 11–13 November, hosted by Es Baluard Museu d'Art Contemporani de Palma.

Mifta Zeleke's Conference Report

My experience as a grantee at the CIMAM 2022 Annual Conference enables me to be much more familiar with and come across the spectrums of the trends happening in museum practices. I was able to witness how the realm of museum practice is going through and being shaped in line with what is happening to the world around us. In addition to the contents; the design of the conference was lucrative in allowing more conversations among grantees, participants, and board members of the CIMAM.

My participation at the conference evidently adds to my understanding of the greater and elastically wide spectrum of the functions of museums. The experience would hopefully enable me to divergently think and diversify the types of activities or projects that I possibly aim to engage in the context of a museum. The conference, for me, was also a means to meditate and look back on how a modern art museum could possibly serve as a place for societal engagements in addition to the conventional commitments and aims of its routines.

One of the many great gears of the conference was how each topic was indulgent in making layers and building upon one another. In addition to the saturated topics; how each was intertwined was the greatest strength of the annual conference. I believe that such a trend would continue as it allows participants, especially grantees like me, to find the right contexts to be able to identify what surrounds their practice as well as how to find ways to interact and engage with the various facets of museum practices. Among the topics and sessions; “Learning from the community: Collective Actions in the Face of Emergency” was the pinnacle of the conference for me. The Perspective Did you Hear That? by Philip Rizk was expressly significant to me. This is because of the fact that one of the liabilities in the realm of art is to be a voice to society and the stories happening them in a way that refers to human conditions globally as well. With this regard, the perspective that Philip shared is also a direction that I aim to forge my future curatorial practice in a more or less similar direction.

In short, I can say that the conference is opening a new chapter in unfolding fresher perspectives in museum practice through networking; apprising me of trending issues about museum practices and leading me to imagine wider and bigger in scale as well as in-depth.