Steffen Egle

9.6 From Asking Questions to Re-curating the Collection. Audience Participation and New Narratives in a Renowned Museum (Panel)

Panellists:

Steffen Egle – Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, Germany

Marc Fritzsche – University of Kaiserslautern Landau, Germany

Abstract:

The Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern (mpk) has recently begun to critically review its own exhibition, collection and communication practices. This includes questions in the fields of de-colonisation, involvement of urban society and arts education. In the course of the past two years, the museum transformed the permanent collection into a space of experiment and research, involving different groups in the process: a group of diverse members of different communities in Kaiserslautern, three student groups, and one artist. In the panel, mpk director Steffen Egle gives a survey of the lessons learned through the various projects – and the specific assets formats of audience participation provided in rethinking the collection display. Marc Fritzsche, professor of art education at RPTU, focuses on his experiences with two groups of art education students who were asked to support this process on the basis of their individual views and expertise. The students provided critical assessments of, among other things, the canon on display, the atmosphere of the room, individual paintings and the overall appearance of the museum. They temporarily took over the museum’s Instagram account and developed written interventions that are now part of the presentation in the museum. In an intense collaborative process, they fundamentally re-curated the room where art since 1945 is on show. This included unusual types of display as well as diverse offers of context and interaction. Following the two brief introductions we will discuss how such processes of audience participation in a museum can become fruitful.