June 29th, 2016
7pm
Salon of former Palais Dürckheim, Cranachstraße 47, Weimar

SANAA Architects and the New Idea of the Museum Lecture by Karen van den Berg

The Tokyo based architectural firm SANAA has designed several remarkable museums in recent years. Among the most significant are the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, New Museum in New York, the Teshima Art Museum, and above all, the Louvre-Lens. When the Louvre opened in December 2012 it was celebrated as an entirely new model of a museum – a museum without walls. In my lecture I will argue that SANAA`s museum buildings constitute a new epistemology of displaying and aim for specific forms, practices and rituals of subjectivation. The museum exposes backstage areas, archives and the restoration laboratory and dematerializes the exhibits into informational units. In her recent book "Radical Museology" Claire Bishop has argued, that the specific bodilessness in new museums correlates with 'the dematerialized flows of global capital'. I would rather show how this new type of museum addresses and sets up a new form of world-directedness, which one could – following Charles Sanders Peirce – probably call diagrammatical or collateral, since here observation and interpretation, speculation, dispersal and contemplation are constantly intertwining.