play!

The final exhibition in the Museum as Toolbox project opened in Graz

On September 27 the exhibition project play! opened with a party at Kunsthaus Graz in Austria. Planned together with young adults interested in the museums boundaries and potential, it rounds up the five shows of the Museum as Toolbox project, a project, which has involved five contemporary art museums (MSU Zagreb, Museion Bolzano, KUMU in Tallinn, Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi and Kunsthaus Graz) with support from the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. The aim of the project has been to explore different ways of involving young people in the museums’ activities.

Five artists were invited to the participating museums in 2016 to carry out a residency with the young people and the staff, and mentors from the museums have accompanied the youth groups in curating, building up, mediating and communicating the shows. In each venue, the exhibition has taken on a different nuance, placing the five works of art, resulting from the residencies, in dialogue with works from the museums’ collections selected by the young participants.

In the case of play! at Kunsthaus Graz, visitors are invited to interact not only with the works resulting from the artists’ residences but also with selected contemporary works, games and the Kunsthaus Graz itself. The exhibition builds on tools that allow the visitor to experience and deal with themes such as communication, identity, migration and self-representation in an artistic interaction. You are invited on a journey to the edges of the imaginable, where alternative solutions for coming together and acting together are revealed—in the presentation of art and in play.

A joint catalogue of the five exhibitions is available upon request, subject to availability, from any of the participating museums.

The closing of the final exhibition in Graz on October 29, 2017 will represent the end of the two-year project which, alongside the afore-mentioned artists residencies and exhibitions, has also hosted a symposium under the title “How museums can be interactive toolboxes and socially-relevant spaces in which different themes are explored” in Tallinn, Estonia, in August 2016. At the symposium, the results of a survey carried out as part of the Museum as Toolbox project to discover the behavioural patterns and attitudes of young people towards contemporary art museums, alongside the learnings during the project in terms of art mediation and communciation tools for the younger generation, were shared with participants. The presentations can be viewed on the Museum as Toolbox YouTube channel.