Class III
Date: 16-19/05/2023
Lecturer: Catherine Nichols
Malls make people want to go inside them, museums much less so. Countless surveys and studies support what cultural workers suspect: shopping is one of the last bastions of public activity worldwide. This observation is typically accompanied by lamentations of cultural decline or critiques of the predatory nature of global capital, pitting consumption against culture, and entertainment against education. Yet what is it about malls, as opposed to museums, that draws people in? What makes them feel welcome, as though they somehow belonged? What can malls teach us – for better or for worse – about the politics and psychology of public engagement? Can such knowledge help us to create cultural institutions that people might actually visit?
Drawing on André Malraux’s influential idea of a “museum without walls”, we will begin this course by considering Kosovo’s first exhibition space, Prishtina’s Gallery of the Arts, which opened in the shopping arcade of the Palace of Youth and Sports in 1979. We will listen to eyewitness accounts and examine archival materials documenting this socialist attempt to bring culture in all its forms to the masses. Comparing this early model to the recent proliferation of art museums in shopping malls, among them Shanghai’s K11 Art Mall, we will discuss texts and videos offering an insight into the advantages and disadvantages of bringing art to the people, albeit in places where culture and commerce conspicuously coincide. And we will consider how such knowledge might assist, conversely, in bringing the people to art shown in spaces less contested by the mechanisms of capital. We will conclude the theory section of the workshop by discussing the degree of public engagement achieved by interventions in the various public spaces and institutions comprising Manifesta 14 Prishtina in 2022 and the lessons being learned from this large-scale public art event in Prishtina.
Building on the preceding discussion, the second half of the workshop will focus on curating and mediating a small exhibition in teams: one to be shown at Albi Mall, one at the Grand Hotel Prishtina and one at the future Museum of Modern Art. Using scale models, the teams will choose from a pre-selected range of artworks to create and present an exhibition that will speak to as many different communities as possible, reflecting on the means, scope and potential of their respective “institution” to truly reach people.
The class will be held in English
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Catherine Nichols
Catherine Nichols is an arts and literary scholar, curator and writer based in Berlin. She currently works as curator at the Hamburger Bahnhof — Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin having recently curated Manifesta 14 Prishtina: it matters what worlds world worlds: how to tell stories otherwise. In 2021 she co-directed beuys 2021, a year-long centenary programme comprising some 30 cultural events in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia as well as an online radio station, a symposium and an interdisciplinary laboratory exploring radical democratic forms of collectivity. Besides curating a broad range of cultural history exhibitions at institutions across Germany on topics spanning from the Reformation to the passions, from the sun to sexuality, she has mounted numerous monographic and thematic art exhibitions including Beuys: We are the Revolution, The End of the 20th Century: The Best Is Yet to Come and Capital: Debt – Territory – Utopia for the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin (in collaboration with Eugen Blume) and Everyone is an Artist: Cosmopolitical Exercises with Joseph Beuys (in collaboration with Isabelle Malz and Eugen Blume) at K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. She has published widely on contemporary art as well as editing numerous catalogues and books.