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Times Museum
Guangdong Times Museum is a non-profit institution funded by private sectors, and Times China has been the core funder since the inauguration of the Museum. In 2003, Times Property (former name of Times China) and Guangdong Museum of Art (GDMA) co-founded the temporary pavilion as a branch of GDMA at Times Rose Garden in 2003. When Wang Huangsheng, the Former Director of GDMA and the curator Hou Hanru invited Rem Koolhaas and Alan Fouraux to conceptualize an architectural proposal in the D-Lab of the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial in 2005, the Museum was incubated as a hub for artistic experiments in the region of Pearl River Delta. After the completion of its facility, Guangdong Times Museum became independent and officially opened its door to the public in December 31, 2010. In November 2018, Guangdong Times Museum initiated Times Art Center Berlin as its parallel institution in Europe with the support of Times China.
We program up to 4-6 exhibitions in our gallery space, introduce over a hundred artists and art works to the city of Guangzhou, and commission more than a dozen new works every year. We reach out to our audience through curated events on weekly basis. We engage with both the artists and the public to develop ideas, produce artworks and test receptions. We value our public role as a cultural institution, and endeavor to formulate conversations and document social changes. While supporting artists to present their critical ideas and to produce ambitious art works, we also attempt to indigenize the language of contemporary art. After a decade of robust programming, Guangdong Times Museum has become a cultural landmark of the city where people can discover art, connect with each other, feel inspired by unexpected learnings and worldly experiences.
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ArtCom
Artcom is a contemporary art and public engagement platform, established in 2015 as a non-profit community-based organization. Founded by independent curator, Aigerim Kapar, with support from the art community,
Artcom aims to connect local contemporary art practices in urban, cultural and social milieux. In doing so, Artcom unites art practitioners, social scientists, philosophers, architects and urban planners, as well as students and the wider public, to exchange experiences and skills, engage in knowledge production, research local issues, and be involved with and create local art and interdisciplinary projects.
Artcom is committed to creating and sustaining the best environment for contemporary art and culture in Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Our mission is to support artists, curators and art professionals; and strengthen their communities, especially the young and emerging among them.
We organize multi-disciplinary, research-based exhibitions, socially engaged initiatives and public art interventions. Collective memory, nomadic heritage, environmental justice and urban accountability are cross-cutting in all our activities.
Since 2017, we have run Art Collider, an informal school where art meets science and technology. Together with art practitioners and academics, we present a series of public lectures, discussions, and workshops in order to find a language to describe our postcolonial situation and decolonial future.
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MG+MSUM
Moderna galerija is a national museum that works, in accordance with its mission, in the fields of modern and contemporary art. It was founded in 1947 as a museum of modern art. With Slovenia’s independence in 1991, Moderna galerija became the principal national institution of modern and contemporary art and an increasingly active link between the local and the international, in particular Central and Eastern European, contexts.
During the transition following the downfall of the Communist regime, Moderna galerija suffered financial problems and personnel shortage. Today’s vision of Moderna galerija is based on its history from the founding to the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and the downfall of Socialism, on the strong experience of the Balkan wars, the transition period and critical awareness of the increasing globalisation processes. The concept of museum advocated by Moderna galerija follows its own way and resists the existing hegemonic models. In the crucial period of the 1990’s, Moderna galerija refused to become a postmodern museum of sensations and intense experiences; on the threshold of the new millennium it fairly clearly developed the concept of an art museum that advocates the plurality of narratives and priorities of local spaces that intend to enter equal dialogues with other spaces only with their own symbolic capital.
Since 2011, Moderna galerija has operated on two locations: in the original building of Moderna galerija (MG+) in the centre of Ljubljana and in the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM) located on the renovated premises of former military barracks. The concept of Moderna galerija as a museum of modern and contemporary art was initiated in the early 1990’s, at the time of a strong need to allow more space for the previously neglected contemporary art and form closer links with the international space as well as with the national history and the historical moment then marked by the war and the new political geography of Europe. In contrast to the past decades, Moderna galerija began to show the interest in the present moment, which involved a different, but no less responsible addressing of the past. This initiated the processes that acquired their first tangible form in the Instrument of Constitution of Moderna galerija (2004) that defines the difference between the museum of modern art and museum of contemporary art as follows.
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- As a museum of modern art it systematically explores, collects, and presents the art of Modernism and its traditions. It deals primarily with Slovenian 20th century art from the beginnings of Modernism around 1900, but also with contemporary artists who continue the tradition of Modernist trends.
- As a museum of contemporary art it covers contemporary practices in the field of the visual arts. It presents new contents in and new ways of expressing, exhibiting and interpreting contemporary art. By regularly purchasing works by Slovene artists, it is building a permanent collection of the 21st century art and adding to the international Arteast Collection 2000+ by purchasing works by foreign artists.
- As a museum of modern art it systematically explores, collects, and presents the art of Modernism and its traditions. It deals primarily with Slovenian 20th century art from the beginnings of Modernism around 1900, but also with contemporary artists who continue the tradition of Modernist trends.
The museum of modern art is defined as a museum devoted to the notion and tradition of Modernism as a historical style. Although established as a museum of contemporary art, the museum of modern art had gradually turned into a museum of the past that accumulated through time and eventually opened the door to the museum of contemporary art. But even if the art displayed in the museum of modern art is mostly from the previous century, the ways of addressing it are determined by the present time and its priorities.
A museum of contemporary art does not necessarily differ from a museum of modern art in terms of historical period: in this respect, the two may even overlap as the tradition of Modernism is still alive while contemporary art draws from different art traditions. The programme of the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova thus reaches back to the new art practices of the 1960’s although its social and political contemporaneity begins especially with the crucial events from the early 1990’s.
Moderna galerija addresses both the museum of modern art and the museum of contemporary art from the aspect of multi-temporality derived from the critique of linear time and its universal validity. Different activities of both museums point out antagonisms rather than cover them by different virtual pluralities. Moderna galerija attempts to develop a different model of museum based on the criticism and redefinition of democratic institution. Its priorities include the construction of a local context and dialogues with different localities that follow especially similar priorities and interests in developing different institutionality and new models of cultural production.
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Rockbund Art Museum
Inaugurated in 2010, Rockbund Art Museum is a contemporary art museum located on the Bund in Shanghai.
With a strong reputation for our innovative curatorial approach, we look to conceive different art projects from research to alternative learning programs, from exhibition-making to unexpected para-performative formats. By supporting bold contemporary art practices, we aim to continually remake local histories, whilst also responding to global art challenges and social mutations.
We regard the role of exchange as an essential process required for a wider transformation to occur by building up a network of multi-regional, international and cross-disciplinary partnerships. Through this process, we aim to cultivate a diverse and deep-rooted connection to our audiences, communities, and also different social and cultural organizations.
More on www.rockbundartmuseum.org
As you go… the roads under your feet, towards a new future collaborates with Rockbund Art Museum through Curtain project initiated by museum director Larys Frogier and number of collaborators Mathieu Copeland, Biljana Ciric, Cosmin Costinas, Hsieh Feng-Rong, Billy Tang.
Initiated in 2020, CURTAIN is a long term research project, which will be articulated through a series of exhibition formats, discursive platforms and cross-institutional collaborations spanning a three-year period. Seeking to go beyond the fixed definition of an exhibition, the project looks to expand the dialogue with artists through the gathering of critical thinkers and practitioners from other social and cultural fields.
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The Public Library Bor
Library and information activity in Bor and its environs dates back to 1869, when the first public reading room was opened in the village of Zlot. Since then, many libraries and reading rooms of various types were opened and closed in the town and its schools, factories, organizations, and nearby villages, especially in the above mentioned Zlot, where the first workers’ or so-called socialists’ reading room was also temporarily opened in 1909. The purpose of the workers’ reading room was not just the acquisition and distribution of the reading materials, but also agitation against and awareness-raising of capitalistic and political exploitation of human resources among the villagers-workers.
During the Second World War, the town of Bor was a forced labor camp, due to the large and valuable copper mine, and there was no public library institution. Books and other reading materials were allowed to circulate only among the Nazi occupants.
The Public Library Bor (‘the Library’) was founded in 1962, when several smaller suburban public libraries and reading rooms were combined. Since then, it has been the central library for the District of Bor. Since 1972, the Library has been located in the House of Culture, in a dedicated space across four floors. The Library has changed its organization several times, and today it consists of six departments: Department for the Acquisition and Cataloguing, Information Services Department, Children’s Department, Department for the Adults (with two sub-departments – Languages and Literature, and Non-fiction), Local History Department, and Special Collections and Periodicals with the reading room. There is also a special broad and well-equipped hall for exhibitions, projections, concerts and other programs on the first floor. The Library has four branches in the nearby villages, too. Right now, 18 librarians work in the Library and its branches, with six of them being senior librarians and one of them an advisor.
The Library continually acquires, catalogues and lends various print and non-print materials and sources of information – books, periodicals, non-book materials such as photos, maps, movies and videos, multimedia etc. The collections are mostly available for self-service and the majority of materials are for use outside of the library. Membership is obligatory for those who want to take the materials home, but the fees are symbolic (1.5–3.5 euros per year) and many categories of citizens, such as pre-school children or the unemployed, can become members free of charge.
The Library collections are regularly renewed, according to the analysis and evaluation by staff of the collections and their purposes, the publishing production, and the users’ needs and demands. The acquisition is selective but non-discriminatory, because the main goal of the Library is to provide access to the reading materials and a variety of reliable and checked sources of information to all citizens who need them in all possible formats.
The other important aim of the Library is to promote reading interests, knowledge, valuable fiction and non-fiction works, sources of scientific information, and literacies of all kinds, including media and information and digital literacy. In order to do that, library staff organize various programs such as book talks, literary evenings with the authors, lectures, panel discussions, workshops for kids, young adults or librarians, and photo-exhibitions, especially those designed to present and promote the Local History Department Photography Collection and/or local photographers and other visual artists. In addition to the materials, the users have 6 PCs with internet access at their disposal. Recently, the Library acquired a VR headset, so that new materials – educative VR content – have become available. There is the possibility of interlibrary loans, too.
The Library participates in the national and international Cooperative Online Bibliographic System and Services (COBISS), so that the information about collections (catalogue records) and a user’s own history of loans, reservations, search terms, and organized saved records are online and freely accessible, searchable and personally manageable for the user.
Since 1999, the Library has published „Beležnica“ (The Notebook) – a journal dedicated both to library and information science activities, especially the activities of the Public Library Bor, as well as the local scene, history, literature and other issues of local significance. The publishing activity of the Library also includes several books (edited collections) as the final results of the various projects.