In the wake of hope. The 2024 Museion program
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“With HOPE, the third chapter of TECHNO HUMANITIES, we have set ourselves the goal for 2023 to create spaces of hope, community, and belonging, and to perceive the museum as an active site of storytelling and imagination.
‘Where do we come from and where do we want to go?’ remains a central question in 2024 regarding a critical and fruitful engagement with cultural heritage and the dialogue between visionary young artists and historical figures. At the heart of the program, which is both regionally and internationally oriented, are sustainable forms of co-production, community building and solidarity.”
Bart van der Heide, Museion Director
In 2024, Museion will focus on sustainable social engagement. This will be achieved not only by looking at historical and contemporary artistic models, but also through the involvement of institutional and private partners and foundations with whom Museion will collaborate to expand its exhibition program and collection. Special attention will also be paid to the promotion of young artists and regional and international transdisciplinary exchanges.
What follows hope? The spring exhibition program will spark a rebirth, in various ways. RENAISSANCE, a major exhibition of works by young artists with ties to Alto Adige and Milan, will focus on forms of regenerative artistic practice. The spirit of these works, which hovers between independence and belonging, visual and applied art, can also be found in the legacies of earlier Italian artists. In fact, at the same time as this exhibition, the work of artist and publisher Ezio Gribaudo will be re-examined from a contemporary and international perspective, in collaboration with the Grazer Kunstverein and the Gribaudo Archive in Turin.
Other key historical Italian figures whose socio-cultural engagement serves as a model for Museion’s institutional practice are Alberto Garutti and Ugo Carrega. Their Cubo Garutti and Mercato del Sale are the focus of two exhibitions linked to the museum collection. Through their work in books, academies and cultural centers, all three mentioned artists play the same key role of transdisciplinary mediation in connecting regional and international art scenes. 2024 also marks the 100th birthday of Val Gardena artist Adolf Valazza, to whom Museion is dedicating a tribute exhibition, based on works from its collection.
Lastly, starting in September, the Enea Righi Collection, one of the most important international collections of contemporary art, will extend its longstanding collaboration with Museion by occupying the entire building for the second time (the first being in 2010). Under the title, Among the Invisible Joins, taken from an essay by Virginia Woolf, this exhibition will bring together works that are both socially and politically engaged and poetically poignant with emerging and internationally established stances in art, architecture and design.
Other key examples that map this synergy between the public and private sectors are two collaborations with international foundations and their related grants that support emerging contemporary art. The first focuses on the RENAISSANCE show, where the VG Award, a grant worth 60,000 Swiss francs, will be assigned by the Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation to one of the artists in the exhibition. The second collaboration is a production grant for media artists from Southeast Asia awarded by Museion, together with the Han Nefkens Foundation, which funds a video work worth 15,000 US dollars every year. This year the artist the award is promoting is Trương Công Tùng, whose new film will be shown in 2024 in various institutions in Asia and Bolzano, before it is donated to the Museion collection.
In the spirit of the TECHNO HUMANITIES research project and the vision and mission formulated jointly with its team, in 2024, Museion will continue to view its work as sustainable, transdisciplinary, and holistic. The overall goal will continue to be that of strengthening the institution’s visionary role of preservation and mediating with regional and international artistic and creative ecosystems, while continuing to build versatile collaborations to expand the activities and fields of action of all three of its project areas: Exhibitions, Museion Academy and Museion Art Club. The core activities of Museion Academy and Museion Art Club are to expand, preserve, maintain and exhibit its collection, while interacting with local audiences and stakeholders, communities. As well as private, corporate, institutional, and academic partners.
