Conserving Active Matter

Item

Title: Conserving Active Matter
Website: https://exhibitions.bgc.bard.edu/cam/
Additional URL: https://www.bgc.bard.edu/
Social Media: https://www.instagram.com/bardgradcenter/
Overview: An exhibition that explored the activity of matter through objects, envisioning the work of conservation as essential for the lives of the things that sustain us.
Type of event: Exhibition
Format of event: Gallery installations
Subject(s) covered: How is matter active? Its conservation in every sense, from the museum to the home
Period(s) and/or Region(s) explored: Spanned five continents; the Paleolithic to the present
Intended audience: General public and museum and academic communities
Host institution: Bard Graduate Center Gallery
Related series / program: Events during exhibition included: Memory Work as Care Work: Black Archives and Archival Practices; Plants as Artifacts: Living Practices of Sugar and Coffee; Conserving Clothing, Preserving Memories, and symposia Conservation Thinking in Japan and Conservation Thinking in India. Also symposia and events during several years before exhibition
Educational component: The events program, gallery visits, symposia: BGC is a research institution
Event in more detail: The effort to conserve is part of the human struggle with the pervasive activity of matter. For as long as people have made and kept material items, they have cared for and repaired them. Today’s conservator uses a variety of tools and conceptual categories developed over the last 150 years to do this work. But new kinds of materials and a new scale of change will pose unprecedented challenges in the decades to come. As threats to tangible and intangible cultural heritage accelerate, conservators and conservation will be essential to caring for the past as well as for the future.

This exhibition, which presents conservation as a form of inquiry in four parts online as well as in person, explores the activity of matter through items that span five continents and range in time from the Paleolithic to the present. Encompassing items that clothe and shelter us, those that engage our imagination, both sacred and profane, those that reflect our interest in the past, and those that continue to enable the performance of the past in the present, the exhibition envisions conservation as vital to the lives of the things that sustain us.
Bio of creator: Soon Kai Poh was the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postgraduate Fellow at Bard Graduate Center, and is now a fellow in objects conservation at MoMA NYC. He graduated from the dual MA/MS program in History of Art and the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works at the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, specializing in objects conservation with a particular interest in Asian and Near-Eastern works of art. His professional interests include the interpretive and technological implications of material culture arising from trans-geographical interactions, theory and practice in conservation, and in sharing the privilege of participating in the histories of objects with others.
Home City or Region: New York, New York
Date: March 25 – July 10, 2022
Creator: Soon Kai Poh and Peter N. Miller

Item sets: Events

Media: CAM Face and Shoulder from an Anthropoid Sarcophagus, 332–30 BCE Brooklyn Museum.jpg; CAM Electric Life, 2019 Teresa van Dongen.jpg; CAM Xisiwe_Wolf Headdress_ late 19th century Kwakwaka wakw Wood, pigment, and synthetic hair AMNH.jpg; CAM Housetop Center Medallion Quilt, 1970s Annie Mae Young, 1928–2013, Souls Grown Deep Foundation.jpg; CAM Platter, 19th century After Bernard Palissy ca. 1510–ca. 1589 Cooper Hewitt.jpg; CAM The Conservator’s Cupboard, 2017, Glass, paper, metals, wood, pigments, plastics, rubber, and other mixed media, Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.jpg; CAM entrance.jpg

This item was submitted on August 3, 2022 by [anonymous user] using the form “Application Form for Events” on the site “Visible Mending”: https://visiblemending.org/s/world

Click here to view the collected data.