OASE #111 Presentation

Staging the Museum / Museum scènes

Friday 03.06.2022, 6:30 to 7:30pm
in English, open to public, free admission
Atelier Bouwmeester, Ravenstein Gallery, 1000 Brussels

Welcoming words by Eric Wieërs
A short introduction by the editors Aslı Çiçek & Maarten Liefooghe

Reflections by guest speakers:
Nikolaus Hirsch (CIVA, e-flux)
Wouter Davidts (Ghent University)

Museums not only facilitate encounters among visitors, objects and stories, but they also facilitate the staging of these visits. They organise tours of the exhibition spaces as well as provide additional publicly accessible spaces, including entrances, corridors, auditoriums and museum cafés.

In nineteenth-century monumental art museums, the transition from city to museum interior was dramatised. Climbing the stairs of Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin or traversing the pergola between the ponds in Berlage’s Kunstmuseum in The Hague urges visitors to leave the everyday world behind. The post-war, ‘barrier-free’ museum, with squares and streets inside and out, seems to want to abolish this city-museum boundary. At the same time, other internal boundaries are being revised, namely those between front stage and backstage. Depots are being made accessible and visitors can now take a look inside restoration studios.

This edition of OASE examines how historical and contemporary buildings stage museum visits and museum activities, how permanent furnishings and temporary scenography interact, and how museums display their activities either transparently or imaginatively.

With contributions by
Maria Alvarez Garcia, Camille Bladt, Aslı Çiçek, Adria Daraban, Georgios Eftaxiopoulos, Tony Fretton, Matteo Ghidoni, Aurélie Hachez, Sandra Kisters, Maarten Liefooghe, Elena Montanari, Mark Pimlott, Michele Porcelluzzi, Gennaro Postiglione, Elsbeth Ronner, Chiara Velicogna, Paul Vermeulen, Stefaan Vervoort

OASE journal