msdm house—studio—gallery: publication as installation
MUSEUMS WITHOUT WALLS conference+exhibition
Isabel Bader Centre Kingston CA, 2022
msdm house—studio—gallery
publication as installation
on the occasion of
MUSEUMS WITHOUT WALLS
conference+exhibition
Isabel Bader Centre
Queen’s University
Kingston Canada
August 15-17 2022
Part of a larger research on virtual art institutions and communities, the Museums Without Walls exhibition gathers projects that attempt to reimagine our modes of cultural engagement, access, and preservation, using media as diverse as publications, interactive videos, and immersive environments. Participants include artists and initiatives from all over the world: Diogo de Moraes Silva, Écran Total, Gallery 404, Mari Nagem, Michael Lou, Museum of Other Realities, paula roush & msdm, SystemKollectiv, The Broken Timeline, The Zium Society, Velcro Ediciones, and Zentrum für Netkunst. Museums Without Walls is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Queen’s Screen Cultures and Cultural Studies program. More information about the project can be found at museusemparedes.com/en
The title of this event draws from Andre Malraux’s work on the imaginary museum. It evokes how photography in particular – and technical media in general – liberates art history from the hold of exclusive authorities and the physical confines of any one building. In doing so, media could enable more radically heterogenous, multiple, and scalable configurations of the museum. Likewise, the contributions to MUSEUMS WITHOUT WALLS conference and exhibiton examine the role played by media technologies in current, past, and future museal practices. They propose further ways to: dispute ossified narratives and account for overlooked artforms; access and engage with collections; return cultural artifacts to the spheres of circulation; care for the publics, their histories, circumstances, and modes of expression.
Underlying all of these discussions, there is an invitation to rethink what the scope of a museum should be – which shapes a museum, as an assemblage of information technologies, should take – in order to face the many challenges of late capitalism.
Related publication:
“The Expanded Practice of the Artist’s Book: Immersion in the Artist’s Museum,” photo-essay and companion flip-book by Francisco Varela offers a parallel entry point to the project through an analysis of the live–work–curation method, which is identified in relation to various museological frameworks that are exercised at msdm house-studio-gallery. See photo-essay and flipbook [here]
"STUDIO/ ARCHAEOLOGY," one accordion and six pamphlets, documents the interior of msdm project space through a cross-section of representational approaches including photogrammetry, narrative/ documentary context and book art. The 3-d models of msdm space as bookwork offer a reading experience of the building’s interior, as both artist’s home- studio-gallery and space of contemporary archaeology. collaboration msdm [mobile strategies of display & mediation] + UWE Bristol [University of the West of England Bristol]/ Interior Architecture. See bookwork [here]
"DOMENEST 21 cards for mobile strategies of display & mediation," the deck ontain instructions that can be applied to situations related to change, be it moving from one building to another, transforming a collection of objects into an intuitively organised archive, or many other process-based enquiries that aim to achieve open and recombinatory outcomes. Collaboration paula roush and natercia caneira. See deck of cards [here]
"MARATHON MISSILE Vol.III," wearable zine, collaboration paula roush and hera santos. London marathon runners photographed running by the former Rapier missile-training dome behind the brick wall of the Royal Artillery Barracks. Overheated by then, runners discarded their clothes, that were collected and washed by the studio to be upcycled into wearable zines. Photographs of the runners and the dome were edited into pamphlets and sewn in the found garments, with archival research of the Rapier Dome.
See wearable bookwork [here]
msdm installation brings together publications that are part of research, exhibitions, performances, and events in and around the four buildings
that msdm has occupied since 2015. These are buildings with unique architectural features that have been converted into “house-studio-galleries,” spaces defined by their triple purpose of “live-work-exhibit,”
for the past seven years. A late 19th-century Industrial warehouse previously used for self-storage, a warehouse unit that had been a
printer’s workshop in the 1980s, a 1940s art deco electricity showroom
that had also been the UK border agency offices in the 1990s, and, currently, a community day centre with its own nursery now converted
into an art publishing library.
The printed matter gathered in this installation relies on collaborations
with other artists, that come to make work on site, influenced by the
studio materials. It offers a felt sense of the links between photography, architecture, installation, studio production and everyday living, through the medium of publishing, asking the question: what are the boundaries between the spaces of life, creation and exhibition?
Projects shown at the Museums Without Walls exhibition and conference
HOUSE-STUDIO-GALLERY [+] paula roush & msdm
E.C.O. THE MEMORY OF OBJECTS [+]
Magdalena Isaacson L. & Luis Navarro F.
CORDIAIS [+] Mari Nagem
COUNTERPUBLIC EPISODES [+]Diogo de Moraes Silva
ÉCRAN TOTAL - TOTAL SCREEN [+]
Amandine Alessandra, Marine Baudrillard,
Carole Lévesque, Katharina Niemeyer & Magali Uhl
MUSEUM OF OTHER REALITIES [+]
Colin Northway & Robin Stethem
MUSEUM OF MEDIOCRE APPROPRIATIONS [+]
Michael Luo
UKAI Projects [+] Luisa Ji & Jerrold McGrath
Flickr Foundation [+] George Oates
Pan-Tilt-Zoom: An Exhibition for the Electronic Eye [+]
Blake Fall-Conroy & Nimrod Astarhan
The Meander and/as Curatorial Process [+] Treva Legassie
The artist is present [+] Pippin Barr
Museum of the Contemporary [+] Lea Mauas & Diego Rotman
contact
paula roush ::: paularoush@gmail.com
msdm studio ::: msdm@msdm.org.uk