Museum Solidarity Lobby [MSL]
Installation (2013)
Commissioned by MAP/Dallas Holocaust Museum, Dallas, TX and Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana, SI
Museum Solidarity Lobby [MSL] is an interactive installation, framing a discursive space for thinking about the future of national museums in post-national societies. The project links the museum crisis in the Balkans to the closing of cultural institutions in other places across the world. I propose the notion of “lobbying” as an artistic strategy to reclaim the museum for its constituency, making it a site where we can begin to reclaim the lost notion of public virtue. MSL consists of physical installations, hosting activist interventions and reflections. The physical installation is a hybrid of a barricade and a display system that can be assembled in different places in site-specific ways. Exterior installations include barricade elements that obstruct access to the host institutions’ entrance while emitting sound. The interior installation simulates a museum lobby assembled out of recycled museum shipping crates. Each shipping box can be transformed into modular furniture. One module in this system is the Sound Chair, featuring interviews with various experts about the politics of cultural memory and the dynamics of heritage in different contexts. Another module features the work of CULTURESHUTDOWN, an independent civic platform employing creative means to respond to the museological and cultural crisis in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Visitors are invited to become “lobbyists” by filling out Museum Solidarity Day protest postcards.
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Materials: Four museum shipping crates, interviews/sound, textiles, mini players, headphones, postcards, postcard rack, barricade tape
Dimensions: postcard box, 65 x 65 x 160 cm; small box, 35 x 65 x 25 cm; two sound chairs, 85 x 90 x 85 cm; barricade, variable
Concept and design: Azra Akšamija
Research: Zdenka Badovinac, Janeil Engelstad, Dietmar Offenhuber, Sonja Srdanović (conceptual contributions)
Production: Zachary Herrmann, Brad Willis (shipping boxes), Matt Kushan (equipment), Luisel Zayas (drawings)
Photographs: Azra Akšamija, Judith M. Daniels (Wolk Gallery installation photos)
Also see: Akšamija, Azra. Museum Solidarity Lobby. Ljubljana: Museum of Modern Art, 2018.