Collecting practices and collecting as practice
New practices and artistic practices around collecting
Event Slider
Date
- 17:00 / Cancelled 17:00 / Sold out Friday, 17:00
Location
Auditorium 3 Calouste Gulbenkian FoundationThe talk will be livestreamed on this page, in English, with simultaneous translation into Portuguese and interpretation in Portuguese Sign Language.
This conversation will share and explore different ideas and experiences around practices of collecting, questioning how these practices and collections can be placed at the centre of the cultural and social role of art institutions, their collaborations and interdisciplinary projects, their discourses and contemporary artistic practices, and their openness and porosity to greater collective participation.
The session features Paul Gardullo (historian and curator), who brings us the experience of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in building a collection with the participation of communities; Paul Rucker (multimedia visual artist, composer and musician), whose artistic practice and construction of a collection are intertwined around the legacy of enslaved people in the USA; and Rose Lejeune (independent curator), who problematises the relationship between immateriality and the collection/collectible in its relationship with contemporary artistic practices.
The conversation will be followed by the screening of the film Ghost Party (2) by Manon de Boer and Latifa Lâabissi.
Speakers
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Paul Gardullo
Historian and Supervisory Curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. He directs NMAAHC’s Center for the Study of Global Slavery, which hosts international research collaborations The Slave Wrecks Project and the Global Curatorial Project. Paul was part of the team focused on building the museum’s foundational collections, conceiving and crafting its inaugural exhibitions. Recently he directed the exhibition Make Good the Promises: Reconstruction and its Legacies.
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Paul Rucker
Multimedia visual artist, composer, and musician. His practice often integrates live performance, original musical compositions, and visual art installation. Rucker is a Guggenheim Fellow, a TED Senior Fellow, and has received funding from Art for Justice and Mellon for the museum Cary Forward, opening in 2025, of which he is the Founding/Executive Director. He is an iCubed Arts Research Fellow and Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and Curator for Creative Collaboration for VCUarts.
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Rose Lejeune
Curator and consultant, with particular expertise in working with artists whose practices have strong multi-disciplinary, performative, digital, public or social elements. Primarily working on collection expansion and acquisition research as well as artist’s commissions and public art, Rose works across museum and private collections, the commercial, public and education sectors. Rose holds a BA in Philosophy and Art History, and an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (FRSA) .
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Rita Fabiana
Rita Fabiana has been curating exhibitions and projects since 2006. In her curatorial practices, she examined participatory, cross-disciplines and experimental projects and practices where process of institutional relationship, memory/history, storytelling, identities and subjectivities are central. She joined the CAM team in 2011 as a curator and collection manager (sculpture and installation). She was head of programming at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum between 2016 and 2021. She is currently head of CAM’s Live Arts. She has a MA degree in Art History (Université Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne) and a postgraduate degree in Curatorial Studies (FBAUL).
Programme
17:00 / Welcome
Ana Botella – Deputy Director of the CAM
17:05 / Introduction
Rita Fabiana – Live Arts programme coordinator, CAM
17:15 / Community engaged collecting and collections at the Smithsonian NMAAHC
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in 2016 and has welcomed 10 million visitors since. When it was chartered in 2003 it didn’t have a collection or archive. Building the foundational collection for this new national museum resulted in a process of community engagement and trust building that has resulted in ethical collecting practices and collections stewardship that provide a new model for museums in the 21st century. This presentation will talk about the museum’s process of collecting to fill the silences in the archive about African American history and culture as well as the process of stewarding collections with communities through educational programs such as ‘Saving our African American Treasures’ and ‘Community Curation’.
Paul Gardullo – Historian and curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C. (online participation)
17:30 / Immateriality in the Collection
The talk will look at two recent projects developed and curated by Rose Lejeune. Firstly, Collecting as Practice, a research and residency project at the Delfina Foundation in London, which unpacks how artists and collectors alike are redefining the critical discourses of collecting through active engagement both with historical museums and new collections as they are being developed in a global context.
Secondly, Performance Exchange, a UK-wide project which creates cross-sector forms of support for performance through a programme of presentations in commercial galleries in London combined with detailed acquisition information for each work and the development of a network of museums acquiring live works.
Together the projects explore how the broadest range of contemporary art practices integrate with, and change how, we think about collection building, past and future.
Rose Lejeune – Independent curator and director of Performance Exchange
17:45 / How objects tell stories
For over 10 years, Paul Rucker has been collecting artefacts that illustrate how coordinated exclusion, systemic racism and inequity have been present in North American society and beyond.
In 2024 he will be opening the Cary Forward Museum, a multidisciplinary arts space, with an archive of more than 30 000 artefacts that tell the forgotten and erased history of marginalized groups in the US and beyond.
This presentation will talk about our shared histories and who tells our stories, while leading us through his process for selecting artifacts for his collection for Cary Forward. Paul Rucker will also demonstrate examples of how these artifacts were integrated in his own art and installations in the past.
Paul Rucker – Multimedia visual artist, composer and musician
18:05 / Conversation
Moderation:
Rita Fabiana – Live Arts programme coordinator, CAM
18:25 / Q&A
The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation reserves the right to collect and keep records of images, sounds and voice for the diffusion and preservation of the memory of its cultural and artistic activity. For further information, please contact us through the Information Request form.