The selection focuses on the methods and the latest results of artistic mediation. The selection and interpretation of works selected by museum educators are supported by a variety of pedagogical and communication tools, breaking down a closed report in a complex way.
curators: Heléna Csóka, Rita Dabi-Farkas, László Hemrik, Zsófia Somogyi-Rohonczy , Henrietta Szira
Mine, yours, ours – what do we share and with whom do we share it?
What do we mean by sharing today?
The word sharing, first of all, reminds us of posting comments – via various social media platforms, but we can also share time, our opinion, or food with others. Sharing is always based on the same act: someone who owns information, knowledge, or something else, makes it available to others: s/he shares what s/he has.
Since the founding of the Louvre in 1793 to the present-day museums, sharing and making things public has been a crucial issue. During the 20th century, the concept of openness that states that museums are not only available to certain social groups in a privileged position, but are places for sharing and mediating knowledge indeed to the whole society – including individuals living on the margins –, has been interrogated several times. Although there are many remarkable examples of this, the question remains open and inevitable: With whom do we share the museum?
Since the beginning of the 2000s, it has been extremely important in what way and by what means we do this sharing. While constantly examining their own activities and excercising self-criticism, institutions keep asking themselves: How and by what means do we help the viewer to understand the shared artwork, knowledge or experience? How do we help visitors to not only perceive what they see but also interpret it?
Starting from this proposition, the focus of the exhibition is on sharing and examining the artworks and the ways of their interpretations. The works at the exhibition present the theme from diverse approaches: in the work of Daniel Spoerri and Ágnes Eperjesi, food and related activities (preparation, consumption, a meal together) appear as a social event; game at Yoko Ono’s chessboard, or communication in Gábor Bódy’s video work are a special case of information transfer: sharing information by non-language tools.
In addition to this, sharing is a prominent feature of the exhibition in connection with the openness and social responsibility of museums. Although most institutions are accessible today, museums (and their staff) are often not prepared for the unusual perception process of people with physical or mental disabilities. Follow the special route of the exhibition and learn the different points of view and needs of the visitors with the help of the presented alternative solutions.
This exhibition has been created by museum educators, which is the reason why museum education gets a prominent role in the exhibition as one of the most characteristic, most direct means of assisting interpretation and passing on complex experience. With the help of the professional materials of the Museum Educational Methodology Centre, which has been in operation for more than ten years, the exhibition will explain how each artwork has been included in different sessions over the past one and a half decades and in how many ways they were interpreted by the participants.
Visitors also have an active role in the exhibition! There are a number of cases in the history of art when artists tried to introduce their works to museums in an unusual way. Now, anyone has the opportunity to apply for displaying his/her work for two weeks at the Ludwig Museum’s visitors’ exhibition, which is called to life by the buzzword “my museum” and will be constantly expanding. We expect to present works that are inspired by the artworks in the museum’s collection. Thus our visitors become not only recipients but also active participants, the creators of the exhibition.