The Museum Is Multiple
Welcome to a conversation about the book The Museum Is Multiple: Van Abbemuseum 2004 – 24 between the co-editor and former director Charles Esche, curator Corina Oprea and architects and researchers Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti. Introduction by Magnus Ericson, IASPIS.
The Museum is Multiple addresses the urgent process of decolonizing Western museums – a fraught and always unfinished conversation between people, art, the past and the present. The book tells the recent history of the Van Abbemuseum, at once a case study of Charles Esche’s directorship from 2004 – 24 and a richly illustrated archive of the period. At its centre are two long conversations between past and present senior members of the curatorial team. Strewn throughout the book are concise texts on the programming of the last two decades with detailed views of the exhibitions. Finally, three essays consider the museum’s publics, its ongoing links to the colonial matrix of power and its place in the Dutch art world. This book is not a roadmap for how to decolonise a space, but it is a space for that vital conversation.
Design by Laura Pappa
The Museum Is Multiple
The Museum Is Multiple is edited by Charles Esche and Chương-Đài Võ, with contributions from Annie Fletcher, Christiane Berndes, Julia Alting, Nick Aikens, Steven ten Thije, Wulan Dirgantoro, and Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide; infographics by Studio Joost Grootens; and research by Marjolein Ossewaarde and Abril Cisneros Ramírez. The book is designed by Laura Pappa.
Charles Esche is a curator and writer and professor of contemporary art and curating at University of the Arts, London. He is an advisor at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht and board member of ZKM, Stuttgart. He was director of Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven from 2004 – 24. He received the 2012 Princess Margriet Award and the 2014 CCS Bard College Prize for Curatorial Excellence. Among other international exhibitions, he has co-curated Soils, TarraWarra Museum of Art and Van Abbemuseum, 2023 – 4; The Meeting That Never Was, MO Museum, Vilnius, 2022; Hurting and Healing, Tensta Konsthall, 2022; Power and Other Things, Europalia, BOZAR, Brussels 2017; Art Turns, Word Turns; Museum MACAN, Jakarta 2017; Jakarta Biennale 2015; How to Talk about Things that don’t Exist, 31st Sao Paulo Bienal 2014, Ideal for Living, U3 Triennale, Ljubljana 2011; RIWAQ Biennale, Palestine, 2007 and 2009; Istanbul Biennale, 2005; Gwangju Biennale, 2002. His latest publication is Art and Its Worlds, Afterall and Koenig Press, 2021 and he is writing a book on Demodernising with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti to be published by Duke University Press.
Corina Oprea is a curator, researcher, and editor with extensive experience in contemporary art, museology, and cultural theory. She recently held a curatorial position at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, contributing to research, exhibition development, and collection presentations. She was the Curator for Timișoara 2023 – European Capital of Culture, overseeing major exhibitions and international collaborations. As Managing Editor of L’Internationale Online, she shaped editorial and research strategies across a network of 15 European museums. She has held curatorial and academic positions at Konsthall C and HDK-Valand. Her research focuses on decolonial methodologies, performance, and the intersection of art and politics. She has co-edited several critical publications, including Climate: Our Right to Breathe, published by K Verlag and L’Internationale Online in 2022. Oprea holds a Ph.D. from Loughborough University, UK, with the thesis The End of The Curator – On Curatorial Acts as Collective Production of Knowledge.
Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti are architects and founders of DAAR, an artistic research practice situated between architecture, art, pedagogy and politics. Over the last two decades, they have developed a series of research- projects that are both theoretically ambitious and practically engaged in the struggle for justice and equality. In their artistic research practice, art exhibitions are both sites of display and sites of action that spill over into other contexts: built architectural structures, the shaping of critical learning environments, interventions that challenge dominant collective narratives, the production of new political imaginations, the formation of civic spaces and the re-definition of concepts. Sandi Hilal is a visiting professor at Lund University, and Alessandro Petti is a professor of Architecture and Social Justice at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.