AAA Backroom Conversations

Asia Art Archive is the Official Education Partner of ART HK and has, from the Fair’s launch, assembled leading collectors, curators, critics and artists to debate the key issues affecting the international art world and Hong Kong.  Daily events, film screenings and panel discussions, are open to the general public and free of charge.  

Backroom Conversations presented by Asia Art Archive for ART HK 10
Registration: backroom@aaa.org.hk 
For the most updated information, please visit www.aaa.org.hk,
or go to Asia Art Archive’s booth G01 at ART HK 10

Thursday 27th May | Room S421

PANEL DISCUSSION: Containers of the Present: Institutional Collections and the History of Japanese Contemporary Art

6.00 – 8.00 pm | Shinji Kohmoto Chief Curator, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto | Yuko Hasegawa Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo | Yukie Kamiya Chief Curator, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art | Barbara London, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art | Alexandra Munroe Senior Curator of Asian Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York | Moderated by Andrew Maerkle Critic & Writer, Tokyo

With publicly funded museums in each of the country’s 47 prefectures, much of Japan’s museum infrastructure was established during the post-war economic boom, with museums dedicated to modern art appearing in the 1950s and the country’s first public museum for contemporary art in 1989. This panel will address the role that Japanese and international institutional collections play in developing the history of Japanese post-war and contemporary art, their collection maintenance and development despite severe budget cuts initiated in the post-bubble 1990’s, their role as counterweights to market-driven value systems, and possible relevance to rapidly emerging art infrastructures elsewhere in East Asia.


Friday 28th May | Room S421

PANEL DISCUSSION - Private Endowments in Contemporary Art

3.30 – 5.30 pm | Dr. Gene Sherman Chairman and Executive Director, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney | Yana Peel Co-founder and Director, Outset Contemporary Art Fund, London | Daniela Zyman Chief Curator, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna | Agnes Lin Founder and Director of Osage Art Foundation, Hong Kong | Moderated by Savita Apte Art Historian and Director of Art Dubai

Regional based and private art foundations have taken up an increasingly important role in disseminating contemporary art and ideas.  Their numerical growth in different parts of the world in the last two decades reflects the pressing need for resources in the support of art.  While some foundations seek to launch ambitious alternative projects, others aim to educate audiences.  This panel asks prestigious art foundations to discuss their development in relation to contemporary art, social responsibility, recent economic challenges and their influence on artistic practice and the art market.


Saturday 29th May | Room S421

PANEL DISCUSSION – Artist as Activist, Art as Catalyst*

2.00 – 4.00pm | Martha Rosler Artist | Zanny Begg Artist | Wong Hoy Cheong Artist | Choi Tsz Kwan, ger Artist | Moderated by Manray Hsu Independent Curator and Art Critic

New waves of globalization over the last three or four decades have mobilized unprecedented numbers of people, ideas, as well as finance and media across national and regional borders. Since the fall of the communist bloc in the late 1980s the ideology of neo-liberalism has been claiming the role of the sole triumphant mandate for the world simultaneously challenging the practice of democracy while generating widespread injustices and new modes of social control. In response to current social and political conditions, artists and activists have developed new tools for thought and new strategies of resistance aimed at making other worlds possible. For this panel, we invite artists to discuss questions such as: What is the political in political art? What can art do to make another world? What's the role of the exhibition, especially of projects that were made in an activist context? What role does communication and networking play in art-making?

*A series of screenings will be held in conjunction with this panel. (Saturday 10.45am and Sunday 2pm| Room S421)

PANEL DISCUSSION – In the Aftermath of the White Cube: Museums and other spaces

4.15 – 6.15 pm | Sabine Breitwieser Secretary and Treasurer of International Committee of ICOM for Museums and Collections of Modern Art | Eungie Joo Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York | Bec Dean Associate Director, Performance Space, Sydney | Michael Rush Curator, Writer, Critic and Former Director, Rose Museum, Brandeis University, Boston | Moderated by Adele Tan Art Historian, Teacher and Writer

Past decades of institutional critique, postcolonial interventions and the ascendance of globalisation, technologization, and commoditization have seen museum practitioners testing out different strategies, in search of new modes of exhibition, dialogue and exchange. Responses have ranged from interdisciplinary programming to trans-national collaborations. No longer willing to be pristine, disinterested and ultimately sterile white cubes, museums and alternative art spaces today are pressed to continually assert their vitality and relevance and trade in banalities for accessibility. Museums are therefore pitched between experimentation and innovation, playing for unexpected results or yearning for the next stage of certain progress. Competition with the international art biennales and art fairs forces museums to define their own missions in the expanded art ecosystem. How is today’s art museum re-imagining its ethics and politics? What is the function of the art museum in the 21st century? Who is its audience?



Satellite Program

Friday 28th May | extension of opening hours till late | Fairer O.T. | Yau Ma Tei WOOFERTEN project 64 [2010] special arrangement in conjunction with ART HK 10
Address: G/F 404 Shanghai Street, Kln., Hong Kong. Free of charge, for more information: +852 3485 6499 / http://wooferten.blogspot.com
 



 

For more information about last year’s programme, please click here

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