MUMA Boiler Room Lecture
Thursday 15 December 2016, 6.00 - 7.30pm
MPavilion, Queen Victoria Gardens, Melbourne
FREE. No bookings required. Website.
Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) and The Saturday Paper are pleased to present the lecture, Turn! Turn! Turn! Reconsidering Art as Historiography, by visiting international curator Dieter Roelstraete.
In his talk Roelstraete will revisit a series of articles first published online in the spring of 2009 that considered the so-termed ‘historiographic turn’ in art; a powerful trend in contemporary art in the
first decade-and-a-half of the 20th century. The best known of these essays was Roelstraete’s “The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art”, which in 2013 became the basis of his group exhibition that debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
Looking back upon his share in theorizing the notion of art as a historical or historiographic tool, Roelstraete will engage in a retrospective exercise and in turn see how well, or how badly, these ideas have aged. Where are we after art’s turn towards history-telling and history-writing? Are we back to the future or in an altogether different present? Roelstraete proposes that an answer is to be found in another so-called ‘post-‘ paradigm of recent vintage, namely so-called post-internet art. With that particular strand’s affiliation with the languages of fashion and the lifestyle industry in mind, Roelstraete will also consider the very concept of ‘turns’ and ‘turning’; the dizzying speed, that is, with which certain moments in art are quite literally turned into history.
Dieter Roelstraete is a member of the curatorial team of documenta 14. From 2012 until 2015 he was the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago where he curated and co-curated, among other shows: Kerry James Marshall: Mastry (2016), The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now (2015), Simon Starling: Metamorphology (2014), and The Way of the Shovel: Art and Archaeology (2013). From 2003 to 2011 he was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (MuHKA) where he organized major group and solo exhibitions including The Order of Things (2008); Liam Gillick and Lawrence Weiner: A Syntax of Dependency (2011); A Rua: The Spirit of Rio de Janeiro (2011) and Chantal Akerman: Too Far, Too Close (2012). A former editor of Afterall and co-founder of the journal F.R. DAVID, Roelstraete has published extensively in catalogues and journals, including Artforum, e-flux journal, frieze, Mousse Magazine, and Texte zur Kunst.
Following the lecture Hannah Mathews, Senior Curator, Monash University Museum of Art I MUMA, will convene a Q&A session.
Roelstraete’s visit to Australia is co-hosted with the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane.
Publication Launch - Nicholas Mangan: Limits to Growth
The publication from MUMA’s recent survey exhibition, Nicholas Mangan: Limits to Growth, will be launched and available for purchase on the same evening. The fully illustrated publication, designed by Ziga Testen, includes newly commissioned texts by Ana Teixeira Pinto and Helen Hughes, along with an interview between the artist and Barcelona-based curators, Latitudes. Available on the night for the special price of $20/$10 (conc.)