Subject Studies: Re-orientations
Subject Studies: Re-orientations
"How do we inhabit the spaces we inherit? As a contemporary institution stewarding three historic Schindler sites, MAK Center’s mission and work encompasses a broad set of approaches to our sites, spaces, and places, often entangled with both past and present concerns: critical and experimental exhibition-making, arts and architecture organizing and pedagogy, critical preservation practices, site stewardship and climate awareness. Every institution is a proposition, on how we understand and define art and architecture, how we inhabit preservation and heritage sites, how we uphold cultural values, how we organize resources and relations across constituencies, and most importantly, how we engage with one another’s ideas and processes. Yet institutions are also notoriously slow moving, bureaucratic machines. The act of changing perspectives, attitudes, and conduct runs counter to the longevity and repetition of systems often developed to make institutions work. Such systems also demand invisible forms of labor not evident in the economy of exhibitions and events that institutions put forward. Re-orientations invites dialogue between artists, architects, and cultural experts and MAK Center in order to address such forms of institutional labor and collaborative practice, beyond the public presentation of projects and work, with the aim of cultivating porosity and permeability within administrative and care-taking practices of the institution and its publics."