Afer the new institutionalism
Lecture by Alex Farquharson
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw invites to the first lecture from the series "The Landscape of Art after the New Institutionalism" run in co-operation with British Council.
Alex Farquharson reflects on a number of important challenges faced by institutions of contemporary art today, and illustrate these with reference to the approaches and programmes of Nottingham Contemporary, a leading British centre for contemporary art, which opened in 2009.
Departing from the discourse of new institutionalism that developed around a decade ago,
Farquharson reflects on ways Nottingham Contemporary and other institutional actors have sought to creatively and critically reconcile tensions around the local and international, the present and past, independence and instrumentalism, engagement and critique, art and transdisciplinarity, the exhibition and newer, alternative formats.
Alex Farquharson (born 1969) has been Director of Nottingham Contemporary since 2007. In that time he has curated or co-curated exhibitions such as "Aquatopia: The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep" (2013), "Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou" (2012) (with Leah Gordon), "Uneven Geographies: Art and Globalization" (2010) (with TJ Demos), and "Star City: The Future Under Communism" (2010) (with Lukasz Ronduda). For several years prior to that he was an independent curator, writer and lecturer on the Curating Contemporary Art MA at Royal College of Art. During the 1990s he was Exhibitions Director at Centre for Visual Art, Cardiff, UK, and Spacex, Exeter, UK.
