Visual essays

All Items

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  Michelle Lim

  Let’s forget about Oshima

  This visual essay looks at the conditions of art-making and exhibition on Oshima, one of Setouchi Triennale's anchor islands. Up until 1996, when Japan’s Leprosy Prevention Law that required the lifetime segregation of Hansen’s disease patients from society was finally repealed, Oshima had been a leprosarium. Unlike other art islands in the Setouchi region, Oshima is a special place where art does not quite fit in with conventional notions of international contemporary. Residents, local volunteers, and artists stay in touch after the Triennale. But what happens to the island, its museum, and its artworks when the last resident has passed away? The collage of text and image visualizes the transience of the Oshima community as a post-crisis alternative to the museum as an institution, understanding place as a moment in time and memory and interrogating the notion of community as counter-point to society. 

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  Katerina Suverina

  ‘Masha and I Liked Everything, Except for the Exhibition!!!’: The Museum and the Problem of Participation

  Can one consider the contemporary museum to be purely a space for the preservation, protection, and transmission of cultural heritage? What role do visitors play within the museum? How is the transmission of the heritage possible in the context of a constant reproduction by the museum of the distance between the ‘masterpieces’ and the public? This visual essay analyzes the relationships between the museum and its visitors. Their inclusion in the museum process—or exclusion from it—is demonstrated by means of visitor books of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. Audience reactions to Garage exhibitions uncover a way of interaction between the visitors and the museum that is different from the one advocated by classic museology. Instead of the distance that protects the museum from the ‘ignorance’ of its audience and allows for the transmission of knowledge in a monologic form, we can see an example of participatory communication—a form of communication which allows the museum to reflect on its own activities, thus taking a more open and dialogical position in relation to its visitors.