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Support for the 55th Annual Conference of the CIMAM in Buenos Aires

“The Co-Creative Museum: Social Agency, Ethics, and Heritage (9–11 November 2023)

The Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires will host the 55th Annual Conference of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM), which will take place from 9-11 November 2023. CIMAM is an international organization that brings together contemporary and modern art museum professionals. Today, it has over 700 members from more than 80 countries. Each year, some 200 CIMAM members – mostly professionals in curatorial or directorship positions with decision-making authority over programming – meet in a new host city and experience the local cultural scene first-hand. This year, Buenos Aires will be the host city and the conference will play an important role in raising the profile of the Argentine art scene. The visiting professionals will have the opportunity to tour hundreds of art spaces, museums, foundations, galleries, alternative art spaces, archives, artist residencies, theatres, concert and performance halls and meet Argentine artists.

Victoria Noorthoorn, Director of the Museo Moderno, says: “Buenos Aires is a city with one of the world´s most vibrant scenes – the Argentinian scene – where a powerful art community plies its its talent across all disciplines and where artists create new, dynamic platforms for art, education and social action, even in the face of economic fragility and vulnerability.”

CIMAM’s 55th Annual Conference in Buenos Aires is titled The Co-Creative Museum: Social Agency, Ethics, and Heritage. Over the course of three days, delegates at the conference will discuss important questions regarding the social and educational role of modern and contemporary art museums, such as: What does it mean to think of a museum as a co-creative entity? How can a museum foster and strengthen reciprocity among its many communities? When can we legitimately speak about the collective creation of programmes, languages and tasks within an institutional context? What is the educational role of the museum in terms of knowledge production and the dialogic process in pedagogy? How can we foster the construction and care of assets, heritage and bonds through the relations the museum builds with its different communities? 

For the first time in CIMAM’s history, the conference will focus on the social role of the modern art museum. This is a function which is naturally at the heart of museum practices in Latin America, a region where many museums are forced to operate within economic contexts that are less developed and where social inequality is the order of the day. Cultural institutions in the region are highly experienced in collaborating with artists to position the arts as a vehicle for the development of the imagination, expansion of educational concepts and methods, the production of communal and individual knowledge, and resistance to authoritarianism. In short, these institutions are capable of finding ways to develop effective micro-policies, bring about concrete social transformations, build communities and promote social justice.

CIMAM’s 55th Annual Conference will take place in the morning in the auditorium of the Museo Moderno. For the first time, the conference will provide simultaneous translation (English into Spanish and Spanish into English) of the activities and, in addition, will offer a childcare space to assist any parents in attendance. The afternoons and evenings will be filled with an expansive programme of visits that will allow attendees to have a first-hand experience of the immense, diverse multi-disciplinary art scene of Argentina, including not just the visual arts, but also literature, theatre, cinema, dance and experimental music. 

On Day 1, delegates will visit the important Arts District of the southern area of the city, including its numerous institutions and spaces, such as: Fundación Proa, Fundación Andreani, Fundación Lariviere. Gallery visits will include Barro, Calvaresi, Constitución, Nora Fisch, Pasto, Alberto Sendrós and Ungallery, as well as spaces and artist residencies like Fundación El Mirador, La Verdi and Munar, among others. Towards the end of the day, participants will attend an opera at the Teatro Colón. 

On Day 2, visits will be made to the major museums along Avenida Libertador, such as the Malba, the Museo Eduardo Sívori, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and the Colección AMALITA, in Puerto Madero. 

On Day 3, the final day of the conference, the Museo Moderno is organising an unprecedented programme of meetings and visits, custom-tailored for each of the more than 200 professionals in attendance. Each professional will be asked to complete a questionnaire about their areas of interest. They will be provided access to a large website that will act as a map of Argentina’s contemporary art scene as well as a listing of the city’s culture programme for November. Furthermore, the Moderno’s curatorial team will be on hand to provide information and answer any questions about local artists, trends, movements, archives and projects, so that each delegate can select the artists and spaces they wish to visit. We hope that this third day of so many personalised visits will translate into a wide range of opportunities and projects for Argentine art in the world. 

The Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, with the support of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires, is the principal host and organizer of the next Annual Conference. 

The programming and production of the 2023 55th Annual Conference has also been made possible thanks to the generous support of the following partners and key contemporary art museums and foundations in Uruguay and Argentina: Fundación Ama Amoedo and Colección AMALITA, Fundación Proa, Malba (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires) and the Asociación Amigos del Moderno. In addition, Arthaus is contributing important funding that will allow a minimum of twenty Argentinian professionals to attend the conference.