Transitory Parerga: Access and Inclusion in Contemporary Art

What is the role of collaborative research in contemporary museum practice? How can an art institution support research in the arts and humanities? These are some of the questions that were sent to a panel of interlocutors—among them multi-disciplinary researchers, curators, and art managers. Their responses are presented in the form of a discourse about contemporary art institutions and research; its focus is on how art institutions can generate knowledge, support research, and build inclusive environments. 

Access and inclusion are catch phrases in the contemporary art world. However, the structures of that world are often hierarchical and restrictive. Meriç Algün’s Dear Artist, (2020) explores these concerns through an epistemological collage consisting of invitations to various projects e-mailed to the artist in recent years. Do these invitations offer a possibility of genuine engagement? Or do they manipulate artists? Dear Artist, reconstructs the artist’s experience in the form of a video and and an e-mail subscription service. 

This article characterizes the relationship between the museum and its visitors as a dialogic process that enables a play between the public narratives of the museum and the private narratives of the viewers. The museum is presented as a performative site where its dominant socially and historically constructed pedagogy engages in a critical dialogue with the viewer's memories and cultural histories. 

The experience of the exhibitions Moscow–Paris, 1900–1930 (the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, 1981), The Territory of Art and Atelier (the State Russian Museum, 1990), curated by Pontus Hultén, is addressed in this essay in relation to the context of the most recent developments in museology, to a large extent shaped by Claire Bishop’s book Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? (2014).