Museums of contemporary art must act before historical distance emerges or consensus is reached: they commission works that are still in development, collect artistic practices that continue to evolve, preserve changing materials and technologies and must assess their significance in real time.
“After Art History?” asks what happens when art history is no longer the unquestioned epistemic centre of the museum but becomes one form of knowledge among many. The symposium brings together leading voices from art history, anthropology, sociology, visual and digital culture as well as science and technology studies and addresses the question of how museums can continue to classify, interpret, preserve and make decisions under conditions of uncertainty. Through extended individual positions, exchange and discussion with the audience, it explores how historical knowledge can coexist with provisional, situated, anticipatory and collaborative forms of knowledge.
Participation is free of charge.
Welcome
9 am
Dr Sam Bardaouil, Director, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart
The opening proposition tests whether chronology can still orient museums within a present reorganized by political and algorithmic forces.
Keynote Time Decay
9:10 am
Dr David Joselit, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Harvard University
Joselit develops “Time Decay,” examining compulsory presentism and the weakening of past and future as coordinates.
TIME: From Trace to Prediction
10 am
Trace, memory, prediction, and anticipation are reconsidered as museums negotiate responsibility to the past alongside unknowable futures.
Dr Arjun Appadurai, Professor Emeritus of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
The Paradox of the Trace: Reimagines the trace prospectively, asking how archives and memory might contain aspiration, anticipation, and traces of the future.
Dr Elena Esposito, Professor of Sociology, University of Bielefeld; Affiliated Professor, University of Bologna
The Future of Memory: Explores how algorithmic prediction reshapes uncertainty and how museums might preserve the past while caring for future memory.
MEDIATION: How Meaning Is Produced
11:30 am
Meaning is explored as dialogue among artworks, viewers, and computational systems increasingly involved in interpretation and cultural production.
Dr Mieke Bal, Cultural Theorist and Video Artist; previously Professor, University of Amsterdam
Contemporaneity as a guideline for curating in dialogue: Reframes exhibitions as dialogic encounters, where artworks activate viewers through contemporaneity, situated interpretation, and inter-medial exchange.
Dr N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor, University of California, Los Angeles
Computational Systems as Culture Machines: Considers computational systems as cultural producers, proposing cognitive frameworks for evaluating AI authorship, interpretation, and cultural value.
Lunch Break
1 pm
KNOWLEDGE: Who or What Produces Expertise?
2 pm
Knowledge and authority are reconsidered when inherited methods, disciplinary certainty, and fixed expertise no longer suffice.
Dr Irit Rogoff, Professor of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London
Without: Asks how knowledge begins without precedent, canon, method, or certainty, becoming relational through affinities, mutualities, and commitment.
Dr Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard University
Who Authorizes Knowledge: Examines how expertise becomes authoritative when knowledge is situated, provisional, collectively produced, and institutionally accountable.
FUTURES: Who Gets to Shape What Comes Next?
3:30 pm
The final Position asks how museums can imagine and act toward multiple futures without reducing uncertainty to prediction.
Dr Keri Facer, Professor of Educational & Social Futures, University of Bristol
Closing: Reading the Day / Collective Assembly
5 pm
The day concludes by identifying unresolved tensions, altered propositions, and new questions contemporary museums should carry forward.
Programme subject to change.
