what’s inside a museum?
„Museum Collection“
Interactive installation including 6 framed prints and a table, chair, and some papers with a pen on the table.
The 18 by 23 cm. Frames include 10 by 15 cm. Prints of screenshots of comments on a question that I have asked my FaceBook friends: what’s inside a museum?
The audience is welcome as well to contribute their answers to the blank papers on the table.
Museum Collection A conceptual piece of work contains collective expressions of what a museum could include, in an irreversible way of thinking I’ve built up the concept of this work by questioning myself: what could I place in a museum? should I place a collection of answers? or more questions and wonderings?
A museum is an institution established to preserve historical artifacts among other products of historical, scientific, cultural, and artistic importance. The idea of preserving items of cultural and historical significance started thousands of years ago, and the oldest museum built by the Babylonians more than 2,500 years ago was discovered by Leonard Wooley. These institutions avail the preserved artifacts to the public for viewing through temporary or permanent exhibitions all over the world.
Starting from this basic definition of a museum until the new technology which allows museums to build knowledge bases around information about collections. A collection object can be the central link for information about past and present, places, people and concepts, technologies, ways of working, and evidence of the natural world. ‚Digital Collections‘ explains how this vision can be realized. Sound, video, and animations can be digitized and developed as a central resource that can be drawn on for many varied access routes: via the World Wide Web; CD ROMs; through on-gallery screens, and other future products still in development. These technological capabilities raise many compelling issues that need to be understood to successfully develop information collections.
This and some more paragraphs among endless articles and studies in museology, curatorial practices, and collections have led me to these questions: what’s in a museum? What could be in a museum? what should be in a museum?
What is collecting, collection, collective?
https://www.facebook.com/hamdyreda
Hamdy Reda is a visual artist, curator, and cultural activist, living and working between Egypt and Germany. Born in Cairo in 1972, Reda holds a BFA – Painting with honors from the University of Helwan, Cairo (1997), and took part in numerous workshops and training programs in art history, curation, and cultural management throughout his career.
Alongside his artistic career, he founded Artellewa, an artist residency space located in Ard El Lewa, a popular district in Giza. For 10 years, Reda served as the Artistic Director of the space, where he received over 100 local and international artists and sought to activate a dialogue between the artists and the community.
Reda’s work reflects an image of his social, political, and urban environment in Egypt, with its many contradictions, beauty, and ugliness, wealth and poverty, modernity, and underdevelopment. His images are created with a local Egyptian eye but are adept at communicating with the international art scene. In general, his artworks resonate between aesthetic and poetic values on the one hand and the objective concept on the other.
Reda’s work has been exhibited at many venues within Egypt as well as around the world, and he is a recipient of various artistic awards, which, together with the interest of art critics in his work, is evidence of his high profile as an artistic talent. Reda’s artwork includes several visual mediums, such as painting, experimental photography, installation, and interactive artworks. His involvement in the curating and management of many arts and cultural activities locally and internationally reflects his interest in promoting the language of creative dialogue and developing mechanisms for artistic interaction.
