The Palais de Tokyo is delighted to collaborate with Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam in a public presentation of Tools for Demodernizing, a special initiative dedicated towards transformative, systemic and sustainable change in arts institutions. For this dynamic event we are proud to welcome three special guests: Naomi Beckwith (Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), Elena Filipovic (Director of the Kunsthalle Basel) and artist Grace Ndiritu. Through courageous initiatives, rigorous scholarship, and lucid artistic vision, each guest holds unique perspectives upon how to think and practice alternative models to the modern aesthetic canon and the museum as its vehicle.

With case-studies, conversations and haptic exercises, the program responds to the key question, “How might we re-tool institutional time”? This is a question that arises from the Tools for Demodernizing summer training intensive at Kunstinstituut Melly. Participating in this program were key staff from the five Tools for Demodernizing network partners: Artspace (Sydney), the Initiating Council for the Museum of Contemporary Art (ICMoCA) (Kossovo), Javett-UP (Pretoria), and Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM) (Medellín), and Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam). The Rotterdam program addressed the legacy of ‘white-cube’ institutions, questioned in light of pressing issues regarding institutional engagement and social responsibility and in acknowledgment of colonial legacies. In this forthcoming Paris program, the notion of ‘retooling’ is used to consider a practical approach to conceptual impasses; by ‘institutional time’ we undertake a critique of linear and expansionist logics while also reflecting upon temporalities of crisis.

This program takes place as a launch of the Tools for Demodernization online chapbook that gathers documents, reflections and learnings of the summer training intensive. A further launch will take place in Rotterdam on November 10.

This event is in English and will be simultaneously translated into French. Tickets for this event do not give access to the Palais de Tokyo exhibitions.