Museum of the Future: Episode IV

Thursday, 7 March 2019, 18:30 onwards
Prof. Dr. Michael Eissenhauer
Respondent: Prof. Naman Ahuja
 
Friday, 8 March 2019, 19:00 onwards
Prof. Dr. Inés de Castro & Catherine David
In conversation with: Prof. Parul Dave-Mukherji & Shuddhabrata Sengupta

Join us for three public presentations by Prof. Dr. Michael Eissenhauer (Director General of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Director of the Gemäldegalerie und Skulpturensammlung), Prof. Dr. Inés de Castro (Director of the Linden-Museum Stuttgart, State Museum of Anthropology) and Catherine David (Deputy Director of the Musée national d’art moderne (MNAM) - Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris).

Launched in March 2017, Museum of the Future brings together academics, museum professionals and other experts from Germany and India. Comprised of different episodes in which, various aspects of the ‘Museum’ are examined – from the idea of what a museum should be, the changing aims and goals of a museum, to the relationship between museums, cultures and peoples and the museum as a public institution. Taken together with other topics – the invention of traditions; the multiplicity of perspectives and narratives and the systems of hierarchy and classification – the project aims to create a concept for the museum of the future.

In three previous editions we have discussed the role of the museum as an institution of education; the political and moral problems of the ethnographic museum; and the tension between the private and the public institutional imperatives. What connects all these topics are the different ways of thinking about time: the time of contemplation and the evolution of taste, knowledge and aesthetic autonomy; the different times of the ethnographic object and the institution, in which it is presented; the different concepts of time that come with ideas of timeless values and with the desire to confront and to understand the contemporary through the medium of the museum and its objects. In this fourth and last iteration of our series, we would like to emphasize the unique potential and the role of the museum to preserve, to hold, to provide, and to store time for any society.