In September 2019 the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam opened its doors to the public for the much awaited exhibition Chagall, Picasso, Mondrian and Others: Migrant Artists in Paris. With migration as the underlying theme, this temporary exhibition presented the work of renowned modern artists and some lesser-known artists by taking a deep dive into their triumphs and struggles of making art while being a migrant in the city of Paris.

The subject of this article is the situation of archives of art institutions with regard to their public accessibility and usability. After some introductory remarks on the importance of an archive policy for a democratic culture and the problem of terminology when talking about archives, I will take a look at the project Folding the Exhibition. This research project is one of the first in the European context to deal with the situation of institutional archives holdings in the field of art from a practical perspective. This will be complemented by a look at the specific practice in North America, where archivists of galleries and art museums are much more integrated in the archival professional discourse than their European counterparts. As a result, they are also better equipped to meet the challenges of digitization—the subject of the last part of this contribution. In the case of the archives, these challenges are not limited to questions of storing and mediating digital objects but bring to the fore the question of how to organize the historical transmission of processes that no longer leave a “paper trail” in the literal sense. In this respect, the difficulties associated with digitization are also not primarily technical, but rather organizational in nature. The possibility of mastering these difficulties is primarily dependent on the availability of appropriate resources and trained personnel. In the case of art institutions, this is usually the biggest problem.

Engendering integration while acknowledging differences is one of the biggest challenges facing museums globally today. Institutions must reconceptualize the relationship between their collections and the engagement with (new and diverse) audiences at all levels. In response, there has been a shift in the museum model, both theoretically and on the level of institutional arrangements, from the museum as a site of authority to the post-museum as a site of mutuality.[1] The act of curating at its most basic is about connecting different concepts and cultures, and bringing their elements into proximity with each other in order to create innovative ways of seeing that counter social injustice and promote equity on all possible levels. Beyond the museum as “contact zone,”[2] and following Terry Smith, the curatorial turn is interested in exploring new contexts and relationships, and working with an artifact’s ability to reveal hidden knowledge.[3] Museums have become spaces for knowledge creation as well as agents of social regeneration and vehicles of broad social change.

During recent decades, interest in different facets of contemporary Arab art has significantly increased. Although recent developments have played a key role in bringing Arab art into wider focus, gaps remain in scholarly discussions, such as the subject of Arab art and artists in the Soviet Union—a cultural transfer and migration of ideas across time and space. This article discusses the first Iraqi modern art exhibition in the USSR, in 1959. It was organized and carried out within the framework of the 1959 bilateral agreement signed between Iraq and the Soviet Union promoting mutual understanding and cultural exchange. More than 200 artworks were exhibited in Moscow, Baku, and Odessa for nearly three months. The exhibition’s paintings, graphics, and sculptures represented both figurative and abstract art schools. Unintentionally, the show triggered heated debates: cross-regional conversations erupted not only in the official media but also on the pages of the guest books of its venues, Moscow’s State Museum of Oriental Art and the Azerbaijan National Museum of Art in Baku. By looking at the debates around the exhibition content, this article seeks to shed light on how such an exhibition was made possible and how it was perceived in the USSR in the context of the inculcated ideology of socialist realism. What was the purpose of this exhibition and who were the cultural agents behind its organization? What was the role of official cultural players in the USSR in selecting the works and promoting the exhibition? How was the Iraqi exhibition received by the Soviet public? What was the reaction of the official press? How did the ideology of socialist realism affect people’s perception of Iraqi modern art?

The curatorial turn, with its shift of attention from the individual (autonomous) artwork toward the exhibition and the role of the curator in its creation,[1] has brought about a renewed focus on the museum as a political space; a space for experimentation and for transformation, for knowledge creation, and for social regeneration. In this article, the rhetorical figure of parataxis will be developed as a concept to inquire into what happens when performers dance at the museum, and how such dancing can be an agent of social change. For this, I focus on the music video “APESHIT” (2018) and bring rhetorical theory in dialogue with recent theory on proximity, to build on Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the contact zone as a social space “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.”[2] Filmed at the Musée du Louvre and released to promote the new album of R&B singer Beyoncé and her husband, rapper Jay-Z, the music video produces the art museum as a contact zone by bringing black dancers and singers into its space and staging relations between the performers and some of its iconic pieces. Exploring the ways in which the politics of proximity, contiguity, and access in “APESHIT” interface with those of representation to challenge the white colonialist narrative of the museum, this article seeks to understand how dancing affects the social space of the museum and what kind of knowledge dancing at the museum produces.

In the period 1933–1945 the group portrait was an important genre of art in exile, which has so far received little attention in research.[1] Individual works, such as Max Beckmann’s group portrait Les Artistes mit Gemüse, painted in 1943 in exile in Amsterdam,[2] were indeed in the focus. Until now, however, there has been no systematic investigation of group portraits in artistic exile during the Nazi era. The following observations are intended as a starting point for further investigations, and concentrate on the exile in New York and the work of the emigrated painter Arthur Kaufmann and photographer Hermann Landshoff in the late 1930s and 1940s, who devoted themselves to the genre of group portraits.

The exile of artists in the 1930s and ’40s was first discovered, alongside the Third Reich and the Holocaust, as a subject of research in the humanities, including art history, in the late 1960s. Apart from debates over the significance of political or nonpolitical works of art produced in exile and their role in establishing a positive German national identity during the Third Reich, many of the interpretive approaches since then have been determined largely by biographical accounts. It should be noted, however, that some artists were inscribed into art history (or the so-called canon) because of their personal fates as Jews or the politically persecuted. Consequently, the work of art is often treated as a direct document of the individual’s biography.

In July 2007, a few months after Romania joined the European Union, on January 1, 2007, the archives of communism housed by the National Archives of Romania opened to the public. The following year, as a result of an agreement between the National Archives of Romania and the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania, the online communism photo collection, containing photographs from 1945 to 1989 and from 1921 to 1944, became available on the Internet. Also in 2008, artists Ciprian Mureșan and Adrian Ghenie, in a conceptual response to this sudden presence of photographs documenting the communist history of Romania, started to paint Nicolae Ceaușescu as a mixture of personal and public snapshots of the communist leader’s life (fig. 1). “It was Ciprian’s idea,” Adrian stated in an interview with curator Magda Radu. “We wanted to find out if, given the imposed iconography [on communist artists back then and on ourselves now], it was still possible to make an aesthetically passable work.”[1] Their project brings up a daring question, which I argue still standardizes today’s studies of art produced under dictatorships in Romania and elsewhere. Could these portraits function as inspirational art/propaganda and as visual signs open to varied interpretations? Or, in art critic Boris Groys’s words, “Can you have a good portrait of a bad dictator?”[2] Ghenie explains, “My generation, we were all losers historically, economically. There was no culture of winning. Winning under a dictatorship is to make a deal with the power, which is a moral dead end. A black hole.”[3] Therefore, painting a successful portrait of a dictator must be a postmortem portrait realized outside the dictatorship, after 1989. The dictator’s portrait, once an imposed subject under the nationally-implemented aesthetic of socialist realism in Romania, suddenly became a choice within the realm of artistic interest. This way, for Ghenie and Mureșan, such an intentional return to the dictator’s portrait becomes an aesthetic quest to discover how to paint a dictator’s portrait in the wake of censorship.[4] The portrait, as a propagandistic format once imposed and ubiquitous, is now open to the possibility to fail aesthetically or to be rejected or abandoned by the artist. To learn about the past, therefore, often means repainting Ceaușescu as a father figure and a national hero, shrinking the dictator’s former palace to a small cardboard cake (Irina Botea Bucan, 2003), using documents and photographs and reconstructing images of monuments and cities (Calin Dan and Iosif Kiraly, 1995–1996), or replacing the old labels from socialist realist sculptures with new ones (Ileana Faur, 2012). Artists deconstruct historical artifacts and their symbolic meaning by dislocating historical facts from their inert official narrative and relocating them in the artist’s current personal instance. By actualizing these symbols, artists also point to the former dictatorship’s lingering ideological specter in today’s society.

Hou Hanru begins his talk by shifting the conversation away from the idea of the labyrinth and instead initially refocuses it on the idea of movement. Jean Tinguely once paradoxically described movement as static, because “it is the only immutable thing—the only certainty, the only unchangeable.” To Hanru, this idea of movement as the most stable, static form of existence is highly inspiring. He sees movement as a sign of both modernity and liberty, connected to the idea of the labyrinth through their shared role in exploring the limits of the museum as an institution, and of exploring the institution’s capacity for change. Hanru outlines how the themes of the labyrinth, movement, and limits are all pertinent to his project Cities on the Move, curated in collaboration with Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Cities on the Move explores Asian models of modernity and development, as expressed through its urbanization. The project traveled to seven cities around the world, changing every iteration with each instance—each new labyrinth, as it were—and representing a different reimagining in condensed form of what an Asian city might be. The project did not merely address urban form, it also grappled with social contexts and new ideas on how to form relationships between individuals, collectives, and different societal arenas.

Over the past decade, the question of what has somewhat problematically been termed “the Islamization of space” in European cities has come to the fore of political discussion. Much of the debate has focused on public reactions to and punitive state regulations of Islamic spaces of worship. Examples include the Swiss referendum in 2009 on a ban on minarets, voted in by an almost 60 per cent “yes” majority, and a similar ban proposed in Germany in 2016 by the Alternative für Deutschland. Yet opposition to the construction of mosques across Europe is just the most evident crystallization of wider fears surrounding Muslim presence and visibility in the urban landscape, with a variety of studies noting the emergence of racialized “affective geographies” in response to what are perceived to be “Muslim spaces” and “Muslim bodies,” increasingly demarcating city spaces as safe or unsafe, “ours” or “alien.”