Close Up#1
Museum of Arte Útil
An example drawn from the archive of the Museum of Arte Útil presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw during the exhibition Making Use, courtesy Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
The first meeting in the new cycle Close Up will focus on the Museum of Arte Útil, also presented at the exhibition Making Use. The Museum of Arte Útil was created in 2013 by the Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera as a research and exhibition project at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.
The core of the Museum of Arte Útil is a constantly expanding database of historical and contemporary artistic practices exerting social change. The database is available online and has been “activated” many times through exhibitions, workshops, and debates. According to Bruguera, arte útil (“useful art”) is a collection of artistic practices which “have practical, beneficial outcomes for their users, challenge the field within which they operate, focus more on the ‘now’ than the ‘here,’ and replace authors with initiators and spectators with users.” The seminar will discuss the core concepts of the Museum, its organizational and curatorial model, and select examples from its archive.
This meeting will be a starting point in the further development of the Museum of Arte Útil’s collection, which, during the course of Making Use exhibition, will expand to include examples from the Central/Eastern European region. The working group dedicated to this expansion is open to all interested in the history and further development of the Arte Útil project.
