What is the role of museums today? A major three-part exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg (or Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean) reimagines the museum as an active space that is sensitive and receptive to contemporary debates beyond its traditional status as a place of display. The exhibition includes an episode of the NOT REAL ART podcast that ponders the future of museums: “The Explorers Club’s Lacey Flint is Rethinking Museums.” Listen on the player above.
In the episode, host and NOT REAL ART founder Scott “Sourdough” Power sits down with Lacey Flint to discuss her role as the archivist and curator of research collections at The Explorers Club. “Every museum should be talking about how you stay relevant,” Lacey tells Scott during their conversation. “It's a matter of getting creative, and it's a matter of asking yourself, as an institution, whether you're a large institution or a smaller one, what is your mission? Who are the people that you're trying to talk to, and how are you going to go about making that dialogue happen? Because now the really, really important thing in museums is not, as I said, regurgitating information. It's creating a dialogue [...], and that means something different for every single museum across the board. There's no perfect formula to do it.”
Curated by museum director Bettina Steinbrügge with Sarah Beaumont, Clément Minighetti, and Joel Valabrega, the exhibition, A Model, appears in three distinct parts, starting with A Model: Prelude – Rayyane Tabet. Trilogy (through May 12, 2024), followed by A Model (through Sept. 8, 2024), and concluding with A Model: Epilogue – Jason Dodge. Tomorrow, I walked to a dark black star (May 4 to Sept. 8, 2024). The exhibition's second installment invites 16 international artists to “take over” Mudam Luxembourg’s galleries and reimagine new models for the museum that emphasize active and performative environments.
“The museum has to take social changes into consideration and rethink beliefs that have been taken for granted,” explains Bettina Steinbrügge. “Today, the landscape is changing, from a renewed approach to diversity to rethinking existing and deeply anchored narratives and, in turn, rewriting history to re-establish cultures or practices hitherto overlooked or ignored. The recent pandemic also changed behaviors: the feedback loops of social media and constantly improving visual technologies are amplifying our relationship to information and the realities of the world we live in.”
Artists featured in A Model include Alvar Aalto, Sophia Al Maria, James Richmond Barthé, Nina Beier et Bob Kil, Tomaso Binga, Anna Boghiguian, Andrea Bowers, Robert Breer et Pontus Hultén, Matilde Cerruti Quara, Ali Cherri, Tony Cokes, Nayla Dabaji, Jason Dodge, Claire Fontaine, Matthew Angelo Harrison, General Idea, María Jerez et Edurne Rubio, Isaac Julien, Marysia Lewandowska, Hanne Lippard, Renzo Martens, Melvin Moti, Oscar Murillo, Palle Nielsen, Khandakar Ohida, Daniela Ortiz, Hila Peleg, Walid Raad, Finnegan Shannon, Krista Belle Stewart, SUPERFLEX, Rayyane Tabet, Su-Mei Tse, Nora Turato, Dardan Zhegrova, among others.
Scroll through for a sneak peek of the show, then listen to our conversation with Lacey; for more information about A Model, please visit the museum’s website here.
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All photos published with permission of the artist(s).
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