Amos Rex and Publics will host Nina Möntmann to discuss her new book Decentring the Museum along with with Paul O’Neill and her contribution to Not Going it Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating. Nina and Paul will be in conversation and Amos Rex’s Head of Curatorial, Itha O’Neill will moderate the conversation from approx 18.00-19.00.

Register for the event at latest by Monday 9th of September through this link: https://amosrex.fi/register/

The number of places is limited. You are warmly welcome!

Decentring the Museum
Nina Möntmann’s timely book extends the decolonisation debate to the institutions of contemporary art. In a thoughtfully articulated text, illustrated with pertinent examples of best practice, she argues that to play a crucial role within increasingly diverse societies museums and galleries of contemporary art have a responsibility to ‘decentre’ their institutions, removing from their collections, exhibition policies and infrastructures a deeply embedded Euro-centric cultural focus with roots in the history of colonialism. In this, she argues, they can learn from the example both of anthropological museums (such as the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne), which are engaged in debates about the colonial histories of their collections, about trauma and repair, and of small-scale art spaces (such as La Colonie, Paris, ANO, Institute of Arts and Knowledge, Accra or Savvy Contemporary, Berlin), which have the flexibility, based on informal infrastructures, to initiate different kinds of conversation and collective knowledge production in collaboration with indigenous or local diasporic communities from the Global South.

For the first time, this book identifies the influence that anthropological museums and small art spaces can exert on museums of contemporary art to initiate a process of decentring.

Not Going It Alone
In recent years, collective approaches to curatorial practice have become prominent, and not for the first time. While the myth of the stand-alone curator has been largely dismantled in favour of recognising the myriad other actors and agencies—from artists to installers, from gallery attendants to directors, and others—who make their work possible, contemporary curatorial practices encompass far more than bringing simply more collaborators together. Through a collection of essays and experimental texts, Not Going it Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating offers readers a layered and contextual understanding of this phenomenon, its debates, and possibilities across a range of temporalities, positions, and geographical perspectives.

BIOS

Nina Möntmann is Professor of Art Theory at the University of Cologne, curator and writer as well as Principal Investigator at the Global South Study Center (GSSC) at the University of Cologne. Before she has been Professor of Art Theory and the History of Ideas at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and curator at NIFCA, the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art in Helsinki. Curated projects include Naeem Mohaiemen: Langer Tag, Temporary Gallery, Cologne, 2023; Måns Wrange: Magic Bureaucracy, Tensta konsthall in Stockholm 2017; Fluidity, Kunstverein in Hamburg 2016 amongst many others. 

She participated in the long-term Israeli/Palestinian art and research project Liminal Spaces, and in 2010 was a research fellow at the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. She organised a number of symposia internationally. Recent publications include: Decentring the Museum. Contemporary Art Institutions and Colonial Legacies, London (Lund Humphries) 2023; Kunst als Sozialer Raum, (König Books, 2002 / 2017); and the edited volumes The Entire Story Starts Where, ed. together with Carolin Höfler, Berlin (Archive books) 2025 (forthcoming); Decentring the Museum for a Postmigrant Society, edited together with Sabine Dahl Nielsen, London (Routledge) 2025 (forthcoming)

Dr. Paul O’Neill is an Irish curator, artist, writer, and educator. Paul is the Artistic Director of PUBLICS, since September 2017. PUBLICS is a curatorial agency, contemporary art commissioner and event space with a dedicated library and reading room in Helsinki. Between 2013-17, he was Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College, New York. He is author of the critically acclaimed book The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), (MIT Press, 2012), which has been translated into many languages. Paul has authored and co-edited numerous agenda-setting anthologies on curating. Most recent being Not Going it Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating (Apexart, New York, 2024) and Curious (Open Editions, 2024).

Paul has currated over 70 shows across the world, and is widely regarded as one of the foremost research-oriented curators, educators and scholar of curatorial practice, public art, and exhibition histories, and most recently has published three artist’ books as author, co-editor; Maryam Jafri: Independence Days (2022), Kathrin Bohm: Art on the Scale of Life (2023), and Dave McKenzie Banners and Letters (2023). Paul is currently working on the second publication of his curatorial texts called CURED planned for publication later this year.