The Museum as Medium

The truly exciting thing about a big museum is that we can link the collection with large and small exhibitions and other events. One example: the exhibition Explosion showed painting a action and brought together Niki de Saint Phalle’s colour explosions with groups that were less known to us, ZERO and the Japanese Gutai. The presentation spread into the garden, with Yoko Ono in the trees and free jazz by the Cherry family in Buckminster Fuller’s dome, a venue that featured performances and music throughout the summer. It was obvious to everyone that all these parts belonged to one experimental constellation and no further explanation was needed.

The management of Moderna Museet strives to curate the overall programme in order to achieve such constellations – with harmonies and dissonances. Our ambition is to view the entire museum as a medium, not just the individual exhibition. Sometimes this is obvious, perhaps even overly so, as when we emptied the whole museum of its collection and instead gradually filled the building with photography, film and sound, in three stages. Usually, however, we use more subtle means to create meaningful chains of exhibitions. Two such chains will be formed this spring. One is our Öyvind Fahlström project: a series of presentations and events focusing on themes such as maps, games and conflicts; in short, the aesthetic and political zones that Fahlström constantly revisited in his writings and art. This will culminate in a major group exhibition.

The second chain we have called A Bigger World, and it comprises several exhibitions and rooms in the collection, highlighting artists who expand our traditional Western perspective. We have already started in the presentation of the collection, by showing key works by the Palestine artist Mona Hatoum and Shozo Shimamoto from Japan, and one room presents conceptual art from several countries. We will soon continue with a major feature on the South African photographer Ernest Cole. This spring will see the opening of exhibitions of Adrián Villar Rojas from Argentina and Akram Zaatari from Lebanon. The main exhibition this summer, After Babel, involving a group of artists whose works bridge the linguistic and continental barriers and demonstrate the (im)possibilities of translation, will spread throughout the entire building. The centrepiece is a tower, which will serve as a stage for poetry from all over the world.

With these and other chains of events, we want to transform the Museum and take it into a new era. Moderna Museet aspires to be an open museum in a bigger world.

Daniel Birnbaum, Museum Director
Ann-Sofi Noring, Co-Director