Trans Narratives in Museums Collections: Dialogues with Élle de Bernardini and Lyz Parayzo

This essay presents perspectives about the institutionalization of works by trans artists in museum collections. The contribution to this analysis comes from the Brazilian artists Élle de Bernardini (1991) and Lyz Parayzo (1994), who have works collected at the Art Museum of Rio (MAR), Niterói Contemporary Art Museum (MAC), Art Museum of Rio Grande do Sul (MARGS), Contemporary Art Museum of Rio Grande do Sul (MAC-RS), Santander Brasil Colection, Modern Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ), National Museum of the Cultural Complex of the Republic – Honestino Guimarães, Museum of Sexual Diversity, Italian Embassy in Brazil and Pinacoteca of the State of São Paulo. The main aim is to understand the process of musealization from the narrative construction of itself of each artist, the connection between those narratives and the agendas about gender and the artists' conditions. As well, the text discusses the presence and absence of the agenda and the (re)exhibitions of the artworks. In this sense, the researcher has done an interview with two artists about trans visibility in museum collections. Keywords: Trans Narratives; Museums Collections; Élle de Bernardini; Lyz Parayzo;

Remasters of American Comics: Sequential Art as New Media in the Transformative Museum Context

This chapter includes a 2009 essay by multi-faceted University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor Damian Duffy highlighting the curatorial philosophies that avoid confronting the conceptual challenge of bringing the comics medium into the museum by attempting to fit comics, to one extent or another, into traditional fine art frameworks, including as examples the 2003 Contemporary Art Museum Houston exhibition Splat, Boom, Pow!, Masters of American Comics 2005, UCLA Hammer Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art, Comic Release! from Carnegie Mellon University, and his own curatorial work in partnership with John Jennings on the exhibitions Other Heroes: African American Comics Creators, Characters, and Archetypes. This chapter discusses new media, if we still need canons, comics versus fine art, comics as non-art, lone genius versus collaboration, display tactics, narrative, and racial inclusion.

The transient museum: Or a vision of the not-yet-here

This essay forwards the idea of the transient museum, a theoretical and utopian project aimed at dismantling the visual logics that support the contemporary art museum. Beginning from the premise that such museums are predicated upon colonial and capitalist visual logics, the transient museum imagines ways of being in but not of the contemporary art museum and the economies of circulation it engenders. Its tactics engage visuality but, equally, a politics of the body and of movement. As such, Gwyneth Shanks frames two ways of performing the transient museum, against acquisition and an aesthetics of concealment, analyzing highly performative artworks by artists Rafa Esparza and Nari Ward to explain these categories. She argues that the transient museum names ever-accumulating forces of global and historical crisis—forces to which neither the museum nor contemporary art are immune—as a practice of enacting hope and remaking the contours of contemporary art.

SUSCH MUSEUM

Opened in January 2019, the Museum Susch crowned the collecting efforts of Grażyna Kulczyk, who, following her failed attempts at establishing a contemporary art Museum in Poznan and Warsaw, finally found home for her collection in a small Swiss village located between two Alps resorts: Sankt Moritz and Davos. The combination of both spectacular mountainous landscape and the edifices of an old convent into which the display has been built, as well as the purposefully created art pieces, contribute to creating a peculiar atmosphere of the place. Nature, architecture, and art have all merged into one total work here, namely into a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk. Poland is echoed in the Museum: e.g. the genuine name of the institution: ‘Muzeum Susch’ is a combination of Polish and German words; furthermore, the pieces presented in the collection are to a great extent made up of works by contemporary Polish artists; wooden walls of the Museum Café are decorated with prints showing the Zakopane ‘Under Fir Trees’ (Pod Jedlami) Villa. The question whether Grażyna Kulczyk’s collection has found its final home here, or whether it is still possible for it to return to Poland, continues open. The collector herself does not provide an unambiguous answer to this.