On Context

Elizabeth Marlowe, Colgate University
Why Museums Sometime Lie

This lecture will offer a new way of thinking about the tensions between those who wish to own the past and those who wish to learn from its remains. Many U.S. museums continue to collect in restricted areas such as classical antiquity; and even those that have ceased to do so, in belated acceptance of the terms of the 1970 UNESCO convention, shudder at the prospect of forfeiting antiquities acquired between then and now. I argue that these attitudes can undermine their educational missions if they prompt museums to withhold key information about the objects’ history from the public.

Julie Lejsgaard Christensen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek
Mediating Antiquity: The Museum Space as Context

This talk will focus on a challenge highly relevant for many museums representing Antiquity: namely the fact that very often the goal of the museum’s communication about the past is to illustrate the original socio-political, geographical, historical and cultural contexts through material objects that are paradoxically removed in time and place from exactly these contexts and frames of references. Through concrete examples from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek’s past and present exhibitions, the talk will discuss restraints and potentials of the museum space in regard to communicating the context of these displaced objects.

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