Museum walls, press releases, plants, wall texts, plinths, beamers and plug sockets; are all objects that inform and support an exhibition, although the visitor often takes them for granted. They exist as a work of art if they are deemed so in a title plate or exhibition text. What can we understand about the objects in an exhibition space when we approach them differently? A Night at The Museum of Unconditional Surrender is an attempt to make ambiguous the relationship between the visitor and the exhibition’s objects. Presentations, arrangements, and performances will play with these often-defined roles, from passive subjects to active objects, and vice versa.
Alexis Blake presents How to Handle an Object. At Blake’s request, a number of people are choreographed to handle an object they use in everyday life. The Antwerp artist Wesley Meuris talks about FEAK (Foundation for Exhibiting Art and Knowledge), an umbrella organisation that provides professional guidance for the arts, from product to service. Yoeri Guépin‘s lecture-performance is a visual journey focused on objects in different guises: the index, the database, the collection, and the exhibition. In Se non é vero é ben trovato, David Bernstein tells about an architectural competition for a glamping resort in Malaysia. David Bernstein’s performance with sculpture explores the method of ‘thinging’, a reciprocal way of thinking, making things, thinking via things, and by using things as a lens for observing other things. Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, director of The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, chairs A Parliament of Artists and Things, a conversation with the artists Tim Hollander and Hannah James to seek for a common ground among object, to overcome the division between objects and subjects. During the museum night, there will also be a continuous screening of Collection Cinéma (2015), a museum film compilation by Museum of Museum, and music by Musique Chienne, ‘music from Brussels for people and dogs’.
Program
21:00 Welcome and introduction by the director of The Museum of Unconditional Surrender
21:15 The Thing That Disappeared into Other Things – performance lecture by Yoeri Guépin 21:45 – Se non vero é am trovato – performance by David Bernstein
22:15 Foundation for Exhibiting Art and Knowledge (FEAK) – presentation by Wesley Meuris
22:45 A Parliament of Artists and Things – Tim Hollander, Hannah James and Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk
23:15 How to Handle an Object? – Performance by Alexis Blake
23:30 Cocktails, music by Musique Chienne , and a continuous screening of Collection Cinéma (2015), a film by Museum of Museum