Is the Museum a Battlefield?

면세(duty free) 구역에 위치한 자유항 미술품 수장고. 스위스 제네바와 같이 주권이 중첩되거나 국가 권할권이 자발적으로 붕괴된 곳에 마련된다. 인터넷 시대 속 비밀 미술관은 일종의 다크 웹에 해당해 내부 이동 추적이 어렵고 데이터 공간이 불투명하다. 미술관은 힘의 전쟁과 무관하지 않다. 미술관은 전쟁터인가? 지구 내전, 불평등의 증가, 독점 디지털 기술로 명명되는 시대, 동시대 미술관의 역할은 무엇인가?

trans.A freeport art storage facility located in a duty-free zone. It is set up where sovereignty overlaps or where state jurisdiction has voluntarily collapsed, as in Geneva, Switzerland. In the internet age this secret museum amounts to a kind of dark web: internal movement is hard to trace and the data space is opaque. The museum is not unrelated to the war of forces. Is the museum a battlefield? In an age named by global civil war, rising inequality and monopolistic digital technology, what is the role of the contemporary museum?

윤민주 (Yun Min-ju), ArtInsight, 2022-06-02 · in ko · read the full text

In the Parlor, Is the Museum a Battlefield? is an illustrated lecture projected on two screens and a box of white sand as Steyerl investigates the fascinating relationship between art museums and war, starting with a bullet that killed a friend of hers. The audience sits on sandbags, immersed in the narrative that involves the Louvre, the Hermitage, and other arts institutions. “Museums are of course battlefields. They have been throughout history,” she says. “They have been torture chambers, sites of war crimes, civil war, and also revolution.” Although the illustrated lecture was produced for the thirteenth Istanbul Biennial, it feels right at home at the armory, a building initially constructed for the military that now is an arts institution itself.

Mark Rifkin, This Week in New York, 2019-07-08 · read the full text

Para Hito Steyerl los museos son lugares de batalla, como ejemplifica en Is the Museum a Battlefield? (2013) una de las tres conferencias performativas que se reproducen en vídeo. Como argumenta Borja-Villel, director del Museo Reina Sofía, «su obra que arranca de los activismos de finales del siglo XX y de la crítica a las industrias de la comunicación, está planteada como un ensayo que nunca es definitivo puesto que cuestiona incluso su propias convicciones de producción». Lo aclara João Fernandes al explicar que «el reto que plantea la obra de Hito Steyerl es el de descubrir cosas que no conocíamos asociadas a otras cosas que conocíamos, invitándonos así a conocer el invisible que está detrás de lo visible, para lo cual va a hacer que el arte sea interrogado convirtiendo a los museos en un campo de batalla».

trans.For Hito Steyerl museums are places of battle, as she demonstrates in Is the Museum a Battlefield? (2013), one of the three performative lectures shown on video. As Borja-Villel, director of the Museo Reina Sofia, argues: 'her work, which begins from the activisms of the late twentieth century and from the critique of the communication industries, is framed as an essay that is never definitive, since it questions even its own convictions of production.' Joao Fernandes clarifies this by explaining that 'the challenge posed by Hito Steyerl's work is to discover things we did not know, associated with other things we did know, inviting us to know the invisible that lies behind the visible — for which she will have art interrogated, turning museums into a battlefield.'

Rosana G. Alonso, StyleFeelFree, 2015-11-12 · in es · read the full text