The formats of contemporary art institutions are lumbered with a number of serious shortcomings: exaggeration, extravagance, competitiveness, elitism, overproduction, pomposity and wastefulness. As opposed to this, the practices of artists engaged in generating social change are focused on daily chores, unheroic and unspectacular and not always resulting in a tangible work of art, often escaping the institutional radar; migrating – whether of their own desire or due to necessity – beyond the art world. When dealing with the pitfalls of contemporary art, we must bear in mind the freedom of art, including the freedom to cease being what it is supposed to be. Sometimes this is related to returning to more compromised or historically marginalised forms such as propaganda. After all, every work that persuades us of something, be it a form of aesthetics, an opinion, a pleasure or an unpleasurable experience is a form of propaganda. Today more than ever before, we need the art of propaganda to act on behalf of minority rights, women’s reproductive rights and the well-being of our natural environment and other species. The extravagant costume of contemporary art often constrains movement and impedes the ability to deliver a well-aimed blow.

In six short hours in September 2018 a fatal fire brought to an end two centuries’ worth of treasures in Brazil’s national museum. It seems almost unimaginable that so many valuable objects were simply wiped off the earth without leaving any digital trace. Among the digital remains is a sporadic collection that was contributed by users via WikiCommons and a full virtual tour, a product of Google Arts & Culture, where one can easily visit the no-longer-existing museum. In the absence of a systematic digitization effort at the museum, the fragmented collection that remains poses a challenge to fixed taxonomies and epistemic frameworks, traditionally designed by the state. I use the digital residues to observe the ever-growing sense of hybrid spatiality and to offer methodologies for collective navigation and artistic intervention under the conditions of algorithmic rationality.

WORKSHOP / LECTURE PERFORMANCE
The artists group Apparatus 22 will present the many ways in which they are engaging in processes of transformation with museums and other types of institutions: from Blank Auguri, a series of immaterial works that come in the shape of names and acts of naming, to POSITIVE TENSION (IN THE AIR) where criticality and celebration collides through a set of questions formulated in response to a specific institutional context, from ART IS WORK uniforms to queer daydreams of works happening outside institutions or as a way of expanding institutions. All of these ventures are imbued with utopian perspectives spanning from the Suprainfinit universe of Apparatus 22.

The Museum of Prefixes: Learning from the Worst-case Scenario by Rasmus Holmboe
Recently the critical discourse related to the purposes, operations, and relevance of what we used to know as museums, has included terms such as post-representational, non-exclusive, uncurating, decolonial, intermediary and of course the ever-present idea of rethinking; a series of prefixes by which museums and museum studies are constantly trying to invent themselves anew. Is this to say that the category of the new is dialectical and can only be imagined against the backdrop of the old? While this may seem a reactionary approach to the business of clearing the ground for a new vocabulary, there is still much to be learned from past mistakes. We can only ever fail. And then try again. And then fail. And then try again.

Kati Kivinen is head curator at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, where she is responsible for the exhibitions, acquisitions and commissions, and research on the museum’s collections.