Close Up #1: Museum of Arte Útil
Thursday March 10, 7pm
Auditorium of the Emilia Pavilion
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilii Plater 51
Convened by: Sebastian Cichocki, Meagan Down, Szymon Maliborski, Kuba Szreder
The first meeting in the new cycle Close Up will focus on the Museum of Arte Útil, also presented at the exhibition Making Use. The Museum of Arte Útil was created in 2013 by the Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera as a research and exhibition project at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The core of the Museum of Arte Útil is a constantly expanding database of historical and contemporary artistic practices exerting social change. The database is available online and has been “activated” many times through exhibitions, workshops, and debates. According to Bruguera, arte útil (“useful art”) is a collection of artistic practices which “have practical, beneficial outcomes for their users, challenge the field within which they operate, focus more on the ‘now’ than the ‘here,’ and replace authors with initiators and spectators with users.” The seminar will discuss the core concepts of the Museum, its organizational and curatorial model, and select examples from its archive. This meeting will be a starting point in the further development of the Museum of Arte Útil’s collection, which, during the course of Making Use exhibition, will expand to include examples from the Central/Eastern European region. The working group dedicated to this expansion is open to all interested in the history and further development of the Arte Útil project.
About the cycle
Weekly meetings are an occasion to engage more closely with the processes and practices presented at the exhibition Making Use. The Close Up model is intended to examine activity that works on a 1:1 scale and to review such practices as they intersect with the various fields of life. The meetings will steer clear of the lecture format, instead adopting a more open form of discussion, seminar, and workshop. The aim of the cycle is not only to gain a more profound understanding of the practices discussed, but also to activate and contextualize them. The cycle is conceptualized and convened by the curatorial team of Making Use. Select meetings will host other participants of the project.