A MUSEUM THAT IS NOT Closing Lecture - A Museum of Museums
Lecturer: Nav Haq
Time: 16:00 - 18:00 Sunday 30 October 2011
Venue: Guangdong Times Museum, Times Rose Garden III, Huangbianbei Road, Baiyun Avenue, Guangzhou (Exit D, Huangbian Station, Line 2 of Guangzhou Metro)
Organised by: Guangdong Times Museum
Special Thanks to: Times Property

Notice: English lecture with Chinese interpretation. Free entry with limited seats. Please book your seat via email with your name and contact details to info@timesmuseum.org, indicating “Registration for Lecture A Museum of Museums”.

When A Museum That is Not is unfolding, at the other side of the world, an exhibition on view at Arnolfini in Bristol shares our interests on “museums”. Nav Haq, the curator of this Museum Show will give a talk on the closing day of A Museum That is Not. One of the most curious tendencies in modern and contemporary art has been that of museums created by artists, and Museum Show is a large-scale exhibition – a museum of museums – displaying a comprehensive selection of highly idiosyncratic, semi fictional institutions. This was the first exhibition to chart this particular tendency in contemporary art. The reasons for practitioners deciding to work in this way have varied greatly between artists – from critique directed specifically towards institutions of art, to more contemporary examples that focus their attention towards wider social and political realms of cultural hegemony. Across its two chapters, Museum Show exhibited museums by approximately 40 artists from across the spectrum of career status, canonical to emerging, and from around the globe.

* (For further information about this exhibition, please refer to www.arnolfini.org.uk)

Nav Haq is exhibitions curator at Arnolfini, Bristol. From 2005 - 2007 he was curator at Gasworks in London, following which he curated the 3rd Contour Biennial, Belgium, in summer 2007. He has curated numerous exhibitions, including solo projects with artists such as Saskia Holmkvist, Hassan Khan, Michael Stevenson and Kerry Tribe. Haq was also cocurator (with Tirdad Zolghadr) of the long-term research project Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie, investigating the subject of class hegemony in contemporary art. Since 2011, Haq has developed a yearlong programme of exhibitions for Arnolfini's 50th anniversary, considering the philosophical notion of “the apparatus”. This has included the first solo exhibition in the UK by Cosima von Bonin, the group exhibition Magical Consciousness co-curated with the artist Runa Islam, a two-person exhibition of works by Haegue Yang and Felix Gonzalez- Torres, and a historical survey of (semi-fictional) museums created by artists entitled Museum Show. He has also contributed to numerous art magazines including Bidoun, Frieze, Yishu and Kaleidoscope.

A Museum That is Not

Participating Artists and Contributors: ChART Contemporary, HomeShop, Hu Xiangqian, Liu Ding, Museum of American Art in Berlin, Museum of Unknown, Wilfredo Prieto, Wu Jie, Zhang Xiangxi

Curated by: Nikita Yingqian Cai
Exhibition Period: Sep. 11 to Oct. 30, 2011 10:00-18:00（Free entry, closed on Mondays except for holidays）
Venue: Guangdong Times Museum Times Rose Garden III, Huangbianbei Road, Baiyun Avenue, Guangzhou（Exit D, Huangbian Station, Line 2 of Guangzhou Metro）

Guangdong Times Museum
www.timesmuseum.org

Designed by Rem Koolhaas and Alain Fouraux during the D-Lab project in the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial, Times Museum is a non-profit institution funded by the Times Property. It caters to the public and persists on academic independence, aiming at reaching beyond canonical programming to nurture creative processes and cutting-edge practices in the area of art, design and architecture. As an intervention of the living space, it endeavors to discover the potential ‘contact zone’ between contemporary art and the public through the tight integration between various exhibitions and academic communication, as well as of art education and community service by a conscientious effort and, by that means, Times Museum could, on one hand provide potential opportunities and inspirations for artistic production, and on another hand, promote public awareness towards contemporary art and the production process of artists.