Museums are or can become a “third space”, enabling connections outside of home and workplace. They have formed the site of highly diversified (artistic) practices, collections, and narratives while carrying the potential to address and engage with different audiences. These different kinds of audiences encounter museums that, over the last decades, have significantly diversified their presentation formats: white cubes, black boxes, event spaces, theatres, auditoria, multifunctional spaces, meeting, roundtable, and debate areas, workshop and educational spaces, open archives, and open depots.
The artistic, curatorial, educational, and institutional diversification is also apparent in the ways the audience—often called participants, visitors, and even guests—is addressed. While being more inviting, these words carry with them the potential of exchange. Notions such as spectator, observer, viewer, or onlooker are ocularcentric in nature. The term audience, with its roots in the Latin word Aud or “hear,” is increasingly replacing the notion of the public reflecting the changing nature of both art—addressing people with bodies rather than merely eyes—as well as its institutions.
Audiences are agential, relational, (perhaps not always equally) interested, becoming, curious, disappointed, satisfied, unpredictable, polite, inquisitive, part of a group or on their own, often accompanied, and sometimes prone to museum fatigue… They move through and dwell in museums as audiences, reacting and experiencing art and culture in the physical, virtual, communicative, and social spaces created for them.
This issue of Stedelijk Studies focuses on the topics of inclusion, diversity, absences, and presences as well as participation in its broadest sense, with regards to audiences for the art museum. We invite contributors from around the globe to respond in artistic, creative, critical, innovative, or scholarly manner, and in a format that fits the digital journal Stedelijk Studies, that reflect on how one engages with the audience, within diverse geographies, cultures, and/or communities along with their unwieldy realities. These can be economic and political tensions, wars, ecological disasters that consider, amongst others, demographic challenges, migratory realities, social inequalities, and intolerance.
Global and intercultural perspectives on audiences: How do questions, queries, and issues differ or are similar in relation to audiences across geographies?
How important are demographics in audience related practices? How does this define long-term visions artistically, curatorially, institutionally?
Learning from audiences: What can museums learn from audiences? How do the “tastes” of the audience affect the dynamics of the museum? How can museums engage their audiences differently and build new (educational/ curatorial/ technological) models that connect with the realities of today and those of tomorrow?
How do continuities and dissonances in the audience shape the museum, the curatorial constructions, and propositions? What impact does the voice of the audience have on shaping the future of the museum? How to care for the audiences (and the related communities)?
What are the multivalent ways in which working with visitors can open spaces of critique, dialogue, enjoyment, protest, inclusion, and connection for artists as well as museum staff?
How can the different realities of the audiences co-exist in one time and place through the contiguous experience in the museum?
The missing audience: Who is absent in the museum and why? How can the museum build its own diverse and multivocal communities?
What questions do educators, artist-educators, curatorial-educators from different geographies pose with regard to inclusion and diversity considering the gendered, racialized, national, and class politics?
What organizational and institutional changes are needed to bring participation to the core, in order for inclusion and diversity projects to alter from a one-off case to an immersed organizational approach?
How does working with audience become a political act?
Listening to audiences: Since the word “audience” embodies hearing, in what sense can the notion of audience be related to listening? And who listens to whom? How can listening be transformed into a reciprocal activity that leads to co-understanding/co-creation/co-production thus decentralizing and pluralizing art museums?
Exhibition designers, curators, makers, educators, and other creative professionals create, re-form, represent, and sustain relations with museum visitors via their work, designs, workshops, and programs. How can these spaces of mediation be developed and used in order to have and transform relationships with diverse audiences? How can they be used for community building as well as for bringing different communities, groups, and individuals in contact with each other?
What are the potentials for art-based research and practice in the dialogue and dealings of the museums with audiences and what possibilities do these yield to our future spaces of knowledge and methodologies?
What is the impact of the unwieldy times on expectations, hopes, and future projects concerning audiences? What awaits us at the horizon?
All accepted submissions are subject to scholarly or artistic peer review, and all contributors must be open to receive such feedback and work collaboratively toward a final version.
As a way to open up the peer-reviewed process further we will compensate published submissions with a fee of 400 EUR (excl. VAT).
Please send abstracts and artistic proposals (max. 300 words and optionally max. 5 images) and CV (merged in one PDF file) to stedelijkstudies [at] stedelijk.nl by September 2nd 2024.
The Stedelijk Studies Journal is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Issue 15 will be co-edited by Dr. Lora Sariaslan and Dr. Patrick Van Rossem, with Dr. Charl Landvreugd serving as editor-in-chief.
The journal comprises research related to the Stedelijk collection, exploring institutional history, museum studies, and current topics in the field of art and design. All accepted submissions are subject to scholarly or artistic peer review, and all contributors must be open to receive such feedback and work collaboratively toward a final version. Initially accepted submissions can be rejected during the editorial process when papers do not meet the academic level or requirements.
