Call for research
Museumplein 10
1071 DJ Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Diversifying audiences, reaching out, inviting, and maintaining ties with them, hence making the museum accessible and relevant for today’s and tomorrow’s societies remain high on the agenda of contemporary art museums. The related challenges vary, depending on the geography, the socio-economic and cultural context, as well as the political and environmental realities wherein the museums exist.
Museums are or can become a “third space”, enabling connections outside of home and workplace. They have formed the site of highly diversified (artistic) practices, collections, and narratives while carrying the potential to address and engage with different audiences. These different kinds of audiences encounter museums that, over the last decades, have significantly diversified their presentation formats: white cubes, black boxes, event spaces, theatres, auditoria, multifunctional spaces, meeting, roundtable, and debate areas, workshop and educational spaces, open archives, and open depots.
The artistic, curatorial, educational, and institutional diversification is also apparent in the ways the audience—often called participants, visitors, and even guests—is addressed. While being more inviting, these words carry with them the potential of exchange. Notions such as spectator, observer, viewer, or onlooker are ocularcentric in nature. The term audience, with its roots in the Latin word Aud or “hear,” is increasingly replacing the notion of the public reflecting the changing nature of both art—addressing people with bodies rather than merely eyes—as well as its institutions.
Audiences are agential, relational, (perhaps not always equally) interested, becoming, curious, disappointed, satisfied, unpredictable, polite, inquisitive, part of a group or on their own, often accompanied, and sometimes prone to museum fatigue… They move through and dwell in museums as audiences, reacting and experiencing art and culture in the physical, virtual, communicative, and social spaces created for them.
This issue of Stedelijk Studies focuses on the topics of inclusion, diversity, absences, and presences as well as participation in its broadest sense, with regards to audiences for the art museum. We invite contributors from around the globe to respond in artistic, creative, critical, innovative, or scholarly manner, and in a format that fits the digital journal Stedelijk Studies, that reflect on how one engages with the audience, within diverse geographies, cultures, and/or communities along with their unwieldy realities. These can be economic and political tensions, wars, ecological disasters that consider, amongst others, demographic challenges, migratory realities, social inequalities, and intolerance.
For a detailed list of suggested themes and research questions, please visit the Stedelijk Studies call for research page.
All accepted submissions are subject to scholarly or artistic peer review, and all contributors must be open to receive such feedback and work collaboratively toward a final version.
As a way to open up the peer-reviewed process further we will compensate published submissions with a fee of 400 EUR (excl. VAT). We also suggest to browse previous publications in our search page if you are looking for inspiration.
Please send abstracts or artwork proposals (max. 300 words and optionally max. five images) and CV (merged in one PDF file) to stedelijkstudies [at] stedelijk.nl by September 2, 2024.
