M+ Matters | Keynote: Global Museums in Shifting Times

In this lecture organised by M+, Maria Balshaw, Director of Tate, discusses the opportunities and challenges facing museums today as they strive to continue to find a balance between reflecting current situations and remaining impartial, inclusive, and open.

Open to the public since 1897, Tate is one of the world’s leading art institutions and among the most visited in the United Kingdom. It consists of a network of four museums: Tate Britain and Tate Modern in London, Tate Liverpool, and Tate St Ives in Cornwall. The four museums share a national collection of British art from 1500 to the present and international modern and contemporary art, comprising more than seventy thousand items. Tate, like many museums, has in recent years transformed itself in order to remain relevant in the 21st century, refurbishing and extending Tate Britain and Tate Modern, launching the Tate Exchange collaborative learning programme, and organising international partnerships and collaborations. Maria Balshaw addresses the significance of these projects and the institution’s overall strategy in the context of a global sociopolitical climate that is shifting more rapidly than ever. 

“Global Museums in Shifting Times” is the third talk in the M+ Matters | Keynote series, which invites international thinkers and practitioners to share their experiences and insights into the development of projects that have defined the cultural landscape in the twenty-first century.

This edition of M+ Matters | Keynote is organised by Suhanya Raffel (Museum Director, M+) and Isabella Tam (Associate Curator, Visual Art, M+), with Minnie Cheung (Curatorial Assistant, M+). Rosewood Hong Kong is the hotel sponsor of this event.

The talk will be conducted in English, with simultaneous interpretation in Cantonese. Admission is free, and seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Please register in advance: mplus.org.hk/keynote.

About M+
M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the 20th and 21st centuries. In Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, we are building one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world, with a bold ambition to establish ourselves as one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. Our aim is to create a new kind of museum that reflects our unique time and place, a museum that builds on Hong Kong’s historic balance of the local and the international to define a distinctive and innovative voice for Asia’s 21st century.

About the West Kowloon Cultural District
The West Kowloon Cultural District is one of the largest and most ambitious cultural projects in the world. Its vision is to create a vibrant new cultural quarter for Hong Kong on forty hectares of reclaimed land located alongside Victoria Harbour. With a varied mix of theatres, performance spaces, and museums, the West Kowloon Cultural District will produce and host world-class exhibitions, performances, and cultural events, providing 23 hectares of public open space, including a two-kilometre waterfront promenade.