Cave 1: ”Territories”
Launch: April 22–24, 2016 at Art Brussels
www.cahf.be
Contemporary Art Heritage Flanders (CAHF), a collaborative knowledge platform built around the collections of four contemporary art museums in Flanders, Belgium (S.M.A.K. Ghent, Mu.ZEE Ostend, M HKA Antwerp & Middelheimmuseum Antwerp) launches a new series of publications on contemporary collecting called Cave.
Why, what, how, and for who should public institutions collect today? What are meaningful strategies to come to terms with existing collections? What is the role and responsibility of the contemporary art museum?
Cave invites historians, curators, artists and other thinkers to put forward concrete scenarios for the contemporary collection. This can be fiction, art theory, research reports, art-historical case studies, archive documents, conversations, anecdotes, visual essays, or artworks. Cave is not a display of acquired knowledge but rather a tool for producing a train of thoughts and scenario’s on how to think and practice contemporary collecting.
In the first issue “Territories” we try to understand the territory of the collection by mapping it out as part of a cluster of concentric territories that it both forms and partakes in: the territory of the museum-institution and its architectural incarnation, the territory of the nation and welfare state, the territory of history versus historiography, and the territory of center versus periphery.
We have made this tangible by looking at how collecting practices can navigate processes of inclusion and exclusion, the problem of linear historiography, and the role of museums in the creation of identity and territorial representation. We have also considered how collecting participates in its own increasing invisibility, and what seems to be an emerging distrust of history within the contemporary art museum. What difference can new strategies for contemporary collecting make to these issues?
The first Cave includes Clémentine Deliss‘s extended manifesto for an engaged and multidisciplinary claim to the material collection as “prelusive knowledge,” as well as new strategies for the sedimentation of collections and the layering of exhibitions in museum architecture as discussed by Kersten Geers and Richard Venlet. Also featured are a number of historical case studies, such as the under-documented project that artist Jef Geys realized in 1984 at his former high school in the rural town of Balen, with the collection of the museum in Ghent, and the little-known story behind the plan to build Le Corbusier‘s Museum of Unlimited Growth in Antwerp in 1964 as the country’s first modern art museum.
Cave will be launched at Art Brussels with a series of readings and conversations to take place on Friday, April 22, Saturday, April 23, and Sunday, April 24, in the company of the exhibition Cabinet d’Amis: The Accidental Collection of Jan Hoet curated by Katerina Gregos in a scenography of Richard Venlet.
Whereas the readings operate as spontaneous interventions in, and interpretations of the exhibition, thinking through actual collected material, the conversations take up a broader discursive position addressing issues around institutional frameworks, whether private or public, for collections and archives.
Cave 1: “Territories”
Edited by Els Silvrants-Barclay & Pieternel Vermoortel
Published by CAHF & Sternberg Press
With contributions by Beirut, Clémentine Deliss, Kersten Geers, Jef Geys, Anders Kreuger, Maarten Liefooghe, Jens Maier-Rothe, Doris Maninger, Winke Noppen, Louise Osieka, Jasper Rigole, Marije Sennema, Els Silvrants-Barclay, Maarten Van Den Driessche, Richard Venlet, and Pieternel Vermoortel
Cave launch: readings and conversations at Art Brussels
With contributions by Koen Brams, Charles Esche, Katerina Gregos, Jan & Marianne Hoet, Anders Kreuger, Maarten Liefooghe, Jens Maier-Rothe, Hans Martens, Léna Monnier, Mario Pieroni, Philippe Van Cauteren, Richard Venlet, Pieternel Vermoortel, Sara Weyns, and Denys Zacharopoulos
The full program can be found here.