ICOM-Sweden, The Swedish Museums Association and the Swedish
Travelling Exhibitions invite you to take part in

MUSEUM 2000 - Confirmation or Challenge?
International Conference 10-13 JUNE, 2001 in Stockholm

The words confirmation and challenge reflect two opposing
tendencies in the museums' attitudes to the surrounding world: Is
the museum mainly a chronicler or an actor? Does it serve as a
temple or a meeting place? With the international conference
MUSEUM 2000 - Confirmation or Challenge? ICOM Sweden, together
with the Swedish Museums Association and Swedish Travelling
Exhibitions (Riksutställningar), wishes to draw nourishment from
the international debate about the future of museums, their
renewal, and the necessary work of change that contemporary
issues provoke in cultural institutions.

The conference themes are:

New times - separate worlds

What happens to the museum's role in society when the surrounding
world and patterns of culture change? How can museums work in
societies where people are often characterized by rootlessness
and cultural fragments inherited from different times and places?
Do the museums take part in modern society's mechanisms for
inclusion and exclusion?

Artefact, memory, narrative

Meanings of artefacts change; what was once a confirmation can
through time become a challenge. Museums are places where
questions about the cultural heritage, symbolic value, and time
can be discussed, evaluated, and analysed. How can the exhibition
medium be developed to capture people's attention?

Museums and morals

A number of moral issues are becoming increasingly burning - the
stances adopted by institutions and individual museum workers
alike, and loyalty towards the principals, users, and colleagues
in research, collecting, care, communication. Does the
construction of a cultural heritage apply only to what is
considered good and exemplary, or should it also be able to
include history's dangerous memories?

MUSEUM 2000 offer a fantastic opportunity to meet colleagues from
Sweden, the northern countries, Europe and from all over the
world to discuss the important questions that museums are facing
today and which are more or less current everywhere in different
variants.

The invited keynote-speakers are:

George H Abungu - Director General of Museum of Kenya

Kenneth Gorbey - Project Director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin

David J Goa - Curator of Folklife at the Provincial Museum of Alberta,
Canada

Gaynor Kavanagh - Dean of Media and Culture vid Falmouth College of Arts i
Cornwall, England

and

Robert Wilson, Theatrical Producer, artist and writer in New York

If you want to attend the conference you please visit the website to get
more information:
http://museum2000.riksutstallningar.se

or contact:
[log in to unmask]

Deadline for submission of paper/reflections is set to the 23rd of February.

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