‘Symposium: The Absent Museum’

This symposium, featuring a series of individual presentations followed by a panel discussion, offers a discursive platform for the questions raised by the ambitious exhibition project that WIELS presents this summer: The Absent Museum.

The speakers are invited to discuss their experience of elaborating different examples of museum practices. With examples from within Europe and the world at large, they all face tensions between identity and tradition, heightened by transnational displacement and technological disruption. What is to be done when long-standing polarizing and simplistic conceptions such as “the West and the rest,” centre and periphery, or high and low have proved inadequate when defining contemporary urgencies? Which institutional methodologies can be proposed to address the issues of a multiple or global modernity? How can existing art museums actively position themselves in the cultural debate and overcome a binary representation of history in favour of nuance and complexity?

In the light of recent discussions around the future foundation of an institution for contemporary art in Brussels, the European capital, what is at stake is the development of tools for negotiating, translating and mediating an open, cosmopolitan and egalitarian place for art, culture and ideas.