“Museum-ing: Research in Practice”
The foundation of the traditional museum is its object collection, which informs its history and defines the institution as a social and political entity. While the museum persists across societal developments, the basis of its research initiatives often relies on traditions of the past. The transformative methods offered by twenty-first-century art-based research that challenge how objects relate to their institutions could render the museum a more innovative realm of experience.
Our call for research for issue 13 of the Stedelijk Studies Journal seeks out such explorations of “Museum-ing,” wherein art-based research is an act or practice of being with the museum creatively. We direct this call to artists, theorists, curators, and scholars whose art-based practices of research address new and old ways of putting one’s work in conversation with the museum—the building, the phantasmatics of the institution, the potency and history of the artworks located therein. We invite submissions that think around and through the museum and propose “museum-ing” as a strategy to examine, prod, and speculate on the historical, present, and future interstices of knowledges and methodologies. What are the potentials for art-based research to transform the concept of “the Museum” into “museum-ing,” and what possibilities does this shift present?
Our foremost questions include but are not limited to:
–What can art-based research bring to the table when examining the idea of the museum in the 21st century? Is a paradigm shift possible?
–How has the performance or performativity of the Museum situated it as an agent or actor in society and communities and how can it do so in the future?
–How might non-hierarchical methodologies transform the museum into new subject positions, and what possibly does that transformation look like?
–How can (artistic) research positions in the museum create sites of discourse or speculative futures for local and global issues such as post-colonial conditions, the climate emergency, geopolitical tensions, or the question of identities?
–How can art-based research affect the other facets of the museum, such as educational programming, funding, and publications? What artistic or scholarly interventions are needed/could be explored within the museum and institutional space?
–How can (artistic) research allow the museum to recognize its changing audience, today’s youth, or communities excluded from collections until now, and how can the role of research with the museum reach out and open up to these publics?
The Stedelijk Museum has already started addressing these questions by bringing artistic practitioners into the museum’s curatorial and research teams. We work together with artists, scholars, and other creatives to transform the basis of research from Western art history to a broader understanding of histories of art in curatorial and collection practices within our own walls and across digital space. To further develop this environment in which intellectual and artistic labor are equally valued, the Stedelijk Studies Journal has made it part of its process to incorporate peer-reviewed artistic practices. Consequently, our call for research welcomes knowledge transmissions in all its forms: from scholarly writing to the full range of artistic media. The editors of issue 13 seek contributions that add thoroughly researched, idiosyncratic perspectives to current debates, particularly those that leap into the speculative.
All accepted submissions are subject to scholarly or artistic peer review, and all contributors must be open to receive such feedback and work collaboratively toward a final version.
As a way to open up the peer-reviewed process further we will compensate published submissions with a fee of 400 EUR (excl. VAT).
Please send abstracts or artwork proposals (max. 300 words and optionally max. 5 images) and CV (merged in one PDF file) to stedelijkstudies [at] stedelijk.nl by September 5, 2022.
