Special Issue: Renewing the Collection.
This issue’s feature is “Renewing the Collection.” In 2019, the museum celebrated its 15th anniversary. Counting from 2000, the year that the museum began its collection activities, roughly 20 years have passed. Moreover, due to the global spread of the novel coronavirus, which emerged in 2020, we have been forced to limit foreign and domestic travel, and many exhibitions have been cancelled. Under these circumstances, both Japanese and foreign museums have begun to reconsider the existence of their collections. How should we handle, accumulate, preserve, and utilize trends in contemporary artworks over the coming decades and centuries? Along with some outside issue, we have examined this question from a variety of perspectives including that of the museum.
Forum
In the forum, we present research papers by three of the museum’s curators. The first, dealing with the collection, is a study of Naito Rei’s What Kind of Place Was the Earth?, a work that was acquired in fiscal 2020 on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition at the museum. The second focuses on methods of collecting and re-exhibiting performance works, which have become increasingly prevalent recently, based on the example of Shiota Chiharu and Okada Toshiki’s About a Room of Memory, a work that the museum acquired early on in 2009. The third, related to the facility’s education division, discusses the potential of inclusive theater from the viewpoint of Theater 21, which is owned by the museum.