Luis Camnitzer

Luis Camnitzer Retrospective
Organized by Daros Museum, Zurich
Curated by Hans-Michael Herzog and Katrin Steffen
Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Opening Reception
Thursday, September 29, 2011 from 7:00 – 9:00 pm

Symposium: The Future of the Contemporary
Thursday, September 29, 2011 2:00 - 5:30 pm
Friday, September 30, 2011 9:30 am - 3:30 pm
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia

Until recently, Luis Camnitzer has been an insider’s tip in the field of conceptual art. This solo exhibition features some seventy works created since 1966, offering visitors a close look at the Uruguayan artist who may be considered one of the art world’s key figures in the second half of the 20th century. Included in the exhibition is a billboard project placed on the outside wall of the Gallery. This retrospective displays a pyrotechnical intellect, an unusually coherent and principled corpus that is at the same time imbued with a rakish charm and poetic maturity.

Symposium
The museum as an institution has traditionally been devoted to a stable public. Recent shifts in the international socio-economic landscape have brought the very category of the “public” into question. As the speed and fluidity of economic, intellectual, and political exchange increases powered by the motor of globalization, the stability of a singular public has given way to the proliferation of porous publics, calling for a reassessment of the status of the contemporary museum as such. What obligations should the contemporary museum address when confronted by the publics that populate the often fraught space of the “global village?” How has the waning of the permanent collection as a curatorial resource, the rise of online cataloguing, and the proliferation of satellite galleries, trans-national institutional partnerships, and off-site exhibiting influenced the cultural presence of the art museum?

Speakers
Nicolas Bourriaud, Independent Curator, Head of Inspection of Artistic Creation, French Ministry of Culture, Paris; Luis Camnitzer; Catherine David, independent curator; Clémentine Deliss (Director, Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt; Hans-Michael Herzog, Director, Daros Latinamerica, Zürich; Jaleh Mansoor, Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia, Vancouver; Saloni Mathur, Department of Art History, University of California Los Angeles; Maureen Murphy, independent curator; Nicolaus Schafhausen, Artistic and Managing Director, Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; Eugenio Valdes, Director of Art Education and Research, Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro