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Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about museums these days, and few are especially positive or optimistic. It’s taken for granted, in some places at least, that museums are in crisis. To find out what that might really mean, ArtReview asked art critics, curators and museum directors from a spread of institutions and geographies for their diagnoses and treatment plans. Alistair Hudson, of the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe, argues for a radical overhaul, from deaccessioning to cultural ‘moon shots’. Daisy Nam, of The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, believes that in order to survive inevitable political and economic headwinds, museums must be situated within their immediate communities. For Eugenio Viola, the outgoing director of Colombia’s MAMBO, in Bogotá, museums should be contested spaces: that’s their reason for being. While Sarah Jilani makes the case that long-term loans to museums are first and foremost an institutional risk-management strategy in the face of possible claims for repatriation of disputed works. Mariacarla Molè reports from CIMAM’s annual gathering of global museum professionals, where ‘solidarity’ is at the top of the list when it comes to defining their activities and goals. Jonathan T.D. Neil wonders if museums – the ultimate legacy institution – have a future in Trump’s America. Sharmini Pereira, chief curator of MMCA Sri Lanka, considers the possibility that the only museums that truly matter are the ones that unsettle, embrace precarity and create friction rather than foster restful safe places. And farid rakun of the ruangrupa artist collective argues that museums must ‘drop their names, even mandates’ to escape their fate as collaborators in turning artmaking into a rat race.
Also in this issue, Fi Churchman speaks to Tracey Emin about love; Mateus Nunes discusses how sound systems, Brazilian reggae and the country’s northeastern culture have influenced Gê Viana’s work; Kristian Vistrup Madsen considers how John Skoog’s film and exhibition Redoubt address the complicated beliefs required to prepare for an apocalyptic end; Clive Chijioke Nwonka writes about the productive deployment of opacity in Akinola Davies Jr’s new film, My Father’s Shadow; and J.J. Charlesworth annotates the foreword to Alexandre Lenoir’s 1797 Description Historique et Chronologique des Monumens de Sculpture, réunis au Musée des Monumens Français. Plus Lyndon Barrois Jr’s Second-Story Artifacts, a project created specially for this issue of ArtReview.
Reviews of exhibitions from around the world include Pierre Huyghe in Berlin, Robert Rauschenberg in Houston and Anne Hardy in Carlow; alongside reviews of books by John Morgan, Megha Majumdar and Isabel Waidner.
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