Pernille Lystlund Matzen: Whose Bildung? The Life and Afterlife of Institutional Self-Critique in Art Exhibitions on Colonial History

Since at least the 1960s both academic, activist and artist-driven critiques have successfully demonstrated how museums are not just containers of public cultural knowledge, but institutions where power is distributed unequally along structures of race, class, and gender. However, it is relatively new that large-scale, mainstream art museums have themselves started to challenge and renegotiate their own disciplinary frameworks in public view through temporary exhibitions – particularly with a focus on the entanglements of colonial history and art history.
Lystlund Matzen's research project is focused on exploring both the lives and afterlives of such institutional self-critiques in selected temporary exhibitions in the Nordic countries. That is; how is the museum’s changing perception of its own role, in a sense, “put on show” to an audience through the exhibition, and what traces are left of the temporary, outward forms of critique once the temporary exhibition has gone away? The presentation will take its starting point in a case study from the dissertation, namely the temporary exhibition “Call Me by My Name” (2021) at the Munch Museum, Oslo.

• Æstetisk Seminar E-2023 Program
• Æstetisk Seminar E-2023 Plakat 

Æstetisk Seminar efteråret 2023 er tilrettelagt af Nicolas Malevé og Jacob Lund, med hjælp fra Annelis Kuhlmann og Jussi Parikka på vegne af 
Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet.