SMU-Centre 42 Series: Paradoxes of Museum Intervention: The Laboratory Principle

In recent years, the “Laboratory” has gained increased popularity both in the humanities and social sciences as well as in the museum field. It stands for a devotion to the openness of knowledge production, to the notion of the experiment, and to reflexivity towards the architectures and apparatuses of knowledge. What is the specific potential of such laboratory spaces for the museum? How do they relate to the ways the larger institutions display art, culture, and science? What are the limitations in an institutional setting that is traditionally geared towards conservation, and therefore by definition somewhat at odds with the notion of the lab?

This session will begin with a presentation of some insights from the German context. In particular, the presentation will discuss the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, which is due to open in late 2019 and is currently also the largest and the most contested cultural project in the planning within Germany. The Forum has over time become a discursive knot for debates about colonial provenance of ‘non-European’ collections in European institutions, about city-planning and cultural place-making, as well as about the possibilities of alternative modes of museum representation.

This presentation will address two attempts to intervene in the established practice of displaying collections, which are both connected to the larger project: the Humboldt Lab Dahlem (2013-2015), which was an experimental test run for the Forum carried out to explore new ways of engaging with collections and to introduce new formats of display; and the Humboldt Laboratory, which will be the exhibition space of Berlin’s Humboldt University in the future Humboldt Forum.

Through a discussion of these examples, this session aspires to contribute to an exchange that may also be of relevance for the Singapore context; and that enables us to develop further on the question about how the “paradoxes of intervention” may be fruitfully engaging for future museum work. This session will conclude with an interactive discussion on how the notion of the “Laboratory” may be applied and/or relevant to the Singapore context.

The Arts and Culture Matters Series is a platform for robust, lively and collegiate discussion of the issues and challenges related to the arts and cultural landscape. Each discussion will collectively convene members of the arts and creative community including artists, scholars, students, and policy-makers, to explore timely topics that will nurture and advance understanding on the arts and culture, especially in and from the context of Singapore. This series is organised by the Arts and Culture Management Program, in the School of Social Sciences at the Singapore Management University. For 2018, the series is produced in partnership with Centre 42, a non-profit theatre development space.