Lecture
Roger M. Buergel
Let us devise an appropriate image!
04.02.2020, 19h00

Avenida António Augusto de Aguiar, 148 - 3º D
1050-021 Lisbon

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Museum of Arts and Crafts Hamburg, 'Mobile Worlds', 2018. Installation view, image courtesy Geneviève Frisson

Poor Europeans that we are, we, still, live under the spell of the nineteenth century! This condition can be recognised in today’s theatres of war (fought in the Middle East or Africa, along borders drawn up in administrative offices in London, Paris, and Berlin). But it also exists in the museums to which we make pilgrimages in vain, as they can only rebuff our existential questions. This lecture dares to sketch a possible way out of this miserable condition.

Roger M. Buergel is the founding Director of the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zürich, a private organisation that looks at art through the prism of global trade and political history. Together with Sophia Prinz, a cultural sociologist, Buergel curated the exhibition ‘Mobile Worlds’ at the Museum of Arts and Crafts, Hamburg, which was, according to the New York Times, one of the best exhibitions in 2018. With Zhang Qing (National Museum of Modern Art Beijing), Buergel curated ‘Suzhou Documents’ (at the Suzhou Museum of Art, 2016), an exhibition focusing on contemporary China’s ambiguous relation with its pre-modern past. Buergel was the Artistic Director of documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel.