Join us for an intriguing public lecture titled, Metabolic Museum-University with curator, publisher and cultural historian Dr Clémentine Deliss as she discusses the role of museums in educating diverse audiences.
Museums, together with art academies and universities, constitute one of the three major civic generators of art and design. Each visitor to a museum is a potential student if empowered to educate themselves through emancipated visual thinking. Yet accelerated consumerism and the ergonomic management of audiences in the museum often works to impede rather than nurture the flourishing of a democratic intellect in the 21st century.
In the light of current debates surrounding the restitution of looted artefacts back to the African continent, Clémentine Deliss presents a conceptual plan for a metabolic museum-university based on collections both historical and contemporary. She asks how museums can bring in diverse audiences and create a space that is effective and meaningful today?
The lecture will be followed by a discussion between Zeitz MOCAA Chief Curator, Azu Nwagbogu and Dr Clémentine Deliss.
Please note that this event is free with museum admission or #ZeitzMOCAAMembership and RSVP is essential. Click here to secure your place. General museum admission is R190/adults and is available at the door. Enjoy unlimited admission and member-only benefits with Membership which starts at only R270. Purchase your membership now.
About Dr Clémentine Deliss:
Dr Clémentine Deliss is a curator, publisher and cultural historian born in London of French-Austrian parents. She studied contemporary art and semantic anthropology in Vienna, Paris, and London and holds a PhD from the School of Oriental & African Studies, London.
Between 2010-2015, she directed the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, instituting a new transdisciplinary research lab to remediate collections within a post-ethnological context. Exhibitions she curated at the Weltkulturen Museum include Object Atlas – Fieldwork in the Museum (2011); Trading Style (2013), “Foreign Exchange (or the stories you wouldn’t tell a stranger) (2014), and El Hadji Sy – Painting, Politics, Performance (2015).
From 2002-2009, she ran the research project titled, Future Academy with student cells in London, Edinburgh, Dakar, Mumbai, Bangalore, Melbourne, and Tokyo. Between 1996-2007, she published the itinerant and independent artists’ and writers’ organ, Metronome and Metronome Press, which was twice part of Documenta in Kassel (1997, 2007).
She has held guest professorships at the Städelschule Frankfurt, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo, and was Reader at the Edinburgh College of Art between 2003-2009.
In 2017-18, she curated four international roundtables on Transitioning Museums in South East Asia for the Goethe-Institut. In 2016, she curated the Dilijan Arts Observatory, an international gathering of artists, historians, and scientists in a former electronics factory in Armenia. This interdisciplinary fieldwork project was shown in the exhibition Hello World. Revising a Collection at the National Galerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (April-August 2018).
In 2017-2018, she was Visiting Professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC), where she developed Organs & Alliances in connection with students and professors at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (HGB) in Leipzig. In 2018, she received an International Chair at the Laboratoire d’Excellence des Arts et Médiations Humaines, Université, Paris 8.
She has been an expert consultant for the European Union, was a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 2015), and is a member of the Scientific Council of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. She is currently Interim Professor for Curatorial Theory and Dramaturgical Practice at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, and Faculty at Large for Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts, New York.