Unfortunately the lecture had to be canceled due to personal reasons of Aziza Harmel.
The lecture by Aziza Harmel, The Impossible Museum. Tradition of the Oppressed and the Avengers of the Future, takes place in the context of the exhibitibion No Feeling Is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection.
We kindly ask you to register in advance at besucherservice@kunsthallewien.at or directly at the cash desk in Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier. The number of participants is limited.
The lecture will be held in English.
Free admission.
Even if museology is on the verge of dealing with a revision of its own paradigms – as a field of study whose base is strongly tied to European tradition – the contemporary art museum is still a space which abstracts the circulation of power and money.
In order to rethink these paradigms and find alternatives within the Tunisian public sector, curator Aziza Harmel, together with artist Yesmine Ben Khelil, has been thinking of ways to layer contemporary work with existing ethnographic, anthropological, and archeological-colonial museums (in this case the oceanographic museum of Dar El Hout in Tunisia).
The reason for their interest in such institutions lies in the perceived incapability of escaping what they are. They do not abstract their histories and economies like contemporary art museums do. Yet one of the questions they raise is how to occupy existing ruins in a world that has structurally, socially, and culturally moved on?
Harmel’s lecture is a ghost tale about survivance and solidarity based on what T.J. Demos calls “the tradition of the oppressed and the avengers of the future.”