Creating a map of Arctic Indigenous languages and revitalization

In 2019 the University Library at UiT - The Arctic University of Norway partnered with the Arctic Council Indigenous Peoples' Secretariat to create Ságastallamin - Telling the Story of Arctic Indigenous Languages, an interactive multi-media exhibition commemorating the UN International Year of Indigenous Languages. An Arctic Indigenous language map was updated for use in the exhibition, but the print format proved to be limiting, and the exhibition time frame did not allow for a thorough linguistic review. Therefore a follow-up project “Arctic Indigenous languages and revitalization: an online educational resource” was started in 2021 to further develop the map and convert it to an openly available online educational resource in GIS format. One key aspect of the new map is that it will feature individual language names in their Indigenous names, as well as in English and Russian. The project team consists of representatives from Higher Educational Institutions, Indigenous organizations, and Government departments from Canada, Finland, Greenland, Norway, Russia and the United States. The work on the map has just begun and this spring and summer the goal is to collect feedback from Indigenous language experts on the original exhibition print map before designing a new GIS version in the fall. We would like to present the current print map to the Arctic Knot conference in order to receive feedback about additional languages to include, creative ways to present language information in different layers, and suggestions for innovative language revitalization initiatives to feature on the map. There is an online form to collect feedback, and so the lightning talk would be used to present the project goals briefly and then encourage conference participants to submit feedback using the form after the talk.

Restaging Origin, Restaging Difference: Restaging Harald Szeemann's Work

The most common form of restaging is that of the retrospective exhibition, for it can be used to provide a platform for the museum to reaffirm the original exhibition and in turn reaffirm itself as host. For Harald Szeemann, the role of the curator was that of a mediator who, through the exhibition, should attempt to halt the abovementioned closed-circuit of affirmations by questioning existing boundaries and canons. His own work, however, has been repeatedly restaged in recent years. This article focuses on two restagings: the Prada Foundation's When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013 (2013) and the Getty Research Institute's Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions (2018). I argue that restaged exhibitions can take two different forms: they can be focused on revising traditional canons and hierarchies, or they can serve to reaffirm the exhibition and the hosting institution. The two forms are interdependent, however, and most restagings contain a mixture of the two.

Embodied discourse in the bourgeois museum: performative spaces at the Ordrupgaard collection

In a suburb just north of Copenhagen is Ordrupgaard. At the inauguration in 1918, it was arguably the best collection of impressionism open to the public outside France and the USA. This paper has two goals: First, to reconstruct and analyze the important yet little known original exhibition ensemble at Ordrupgaard, and second, to develop a view of the bourgeois art exhibition as a performative ritual. Building on ideas of exhibition narratives and visitor involvement derived from diverse work done within museology and museum studies, the paper proposes a close examination of how collective memory and performative embodiment drive exhibition experience. From this, Ordrupgaard emerges as an early example of a museum that offers its audience the possibility of a pleasurable enactment of middle class identity within a setting encompassing nature, art and architecture. The case of a small collection museum therefore reveals important mechanics at work within a potentially much larger field of institutions.