Conference Announcement - Reshaping the Collectible: Learning Through Change

We are delighted to invite you to a conference that provides an opportunity to come together to share our research at the end of the three-year project, Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum, funded by the Mellon Foundation. The conference will bring together different voices from within and outside the museum to explore the work that has been done and to look to the future from where we are now.

In January 2018 Tate was awarded a major grant from the Mellon Foundation for a programme of research to examine and develop our practice in response to the conservation and management of recent and contemporary works of art, in particular time-based media, performative, live and digital art. The research focuses on works that unfold over time, that question the boundaries between the artwork, the archive and the record, and that have complex social or technological dependencies within networks outside the museum.

The project has brought together conservators, registrars, curators and archivists, and throughout the course of our research has been shaped by the wider events of the past three years. These encounters have challenged our inherited practices, inviting us to think anew. The conference will explore artworks that generate archives, the relationship between memory and the future, radical hospitality and love, replication and the carbon impact of exhibition copies, what is at stake in making the practices of conservation and collection management more visible, and what it means to learn an artwork. 

The core conference will run from 12:00 to 17:00 UK time on the 14, 15, 16 September, with a few additional events in the morning and early evening. A full programme will be available shortly. 

If you have any queries about the event, or have any problems registering, please contact Jess Sully at jess.sully@tate.org.uk