ART AS A PRACTICE OF LIFE
A VISION
On-going research project
A VISION is a research and a creative project that is shaped by my positions as director of art organizations and as an independent curator.
A VISION is also constantly evolving through my sincere friendships with artists, researchers, and independent curators.
A VISION is first and foremost a precious way for me to embrace art as a practice of life.
A VISION is made of multilayered texts accumulated through time.
Its is also a poem written and presented in 2018 on the occasion of the Rockbund Art Museum dinner gala.
In 2021, A VISION was recreated in music and video with Jules Chua, under the copyrights OW - Ocean & Wavz.
From my art history education background to current professional developments, I often notice a misunderstanding about what could be a vision for a contemporary art Museum.
Many art instiution leaders might be driven by the obession of labeling the Museum according to artistic disciplines or national/regional framework - a Museum will be more dedicated to regional contemporary art or will be more “international”, although for me the concept of the “international” appears to be very problematic today.
There are also other museum directors claiming dogmas according to trending binary conceptual systems, such as today a post-marxist/post-colonial vision of a Museum versus a eurocentric Museum of art... If I do understand such positions, I just feel that things are much more complex and subtle in our contemporary worlds today, especially when you see new forms of occupation and colonialism raising from geopolitical partitions and wars in different regions of the world. These new forms of imperialism are seriously impacting our daily lives, our relations to environemental changes, digital transitions, and most and foremost the redefinition of our commonalities.
I truly believe that leadership in Museum institutions and curatorial practices require more fluid and daring approaches than endless anthropocentered definitions of art that are ceaselessly repeating and reshaping themselves decades after decade to better control and oppose art communities between each other.
So let me tell you something: a vision is not about a position neither an identity, nor an assertion of belonging to a system of thought.
A vision is at the root, the germination and the efflorescence of a Museum.
A vision has more to do with the subtle but deep distillation of a soul, a texture, a feeling inside an institution.
To make happen this vision it takes time, risk, attention, humility and engagement according to:
. how you conceive and keep opened you program while never compromising on taking position
. how you develop a solid qualitative relation with artists while growing with an ever changing experience with and for the audience
. how you deeply learn from a context while always trying to step out of this context in order to escape any label, school, community, localism, regionalism or nationalism.
Needless to say that a Museum developement plan requires robust guidelines, creative programs and generous collective learning ativities.
But just before any plan and any program, let's make ourselves available to feel how, between you and me, we can came become together... Just a vision.
