Welcome to Chamber – seminar with Mary Jane Jacob and Merete Røstad

Join us as we reflect on the human dimensions of art that connect us with stories forgotten or previously unrevealed. Artist Merete Røstad, whose sound sculpture Chamber is currently on view outside the Munch Museum, and curator Mary Jane Jacob, known for her site-specific, community-embedded projects, will offer examples from their own practices under the themes of Memorialization, Collaborationand Creative Chaos. The Q&A will be moderated by Natalie Hope O’Donnell, curator of Munchmuseet on the Move. The seminar will include the launch of the publication Merete Røstad, Chamber.

About the speakers

Mary Jane Jacob is a curator and writer who pioneered public, site-specific, and socially engaged art in the US as a shared practice and public discourse in the 1990s with projects such as Places with a Past: New Site-specific Art in Charleston, the Spoleto Festival (1991); Culture in Action: A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago (1992–1993); and Conversations at the Castle: Changing Audiences and Contemporary Art in Atlanta (1996). Since then she has undertaken research projects that illuminate art’s relationship to audiences with such books as Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (2004); Learning Mind: Experience into Art (2009); Chicago Makes Modern: How Creative Minds Changed Society (2012); The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists (2010); and the Chicago Social Practice History series (2014-ongoing). Her next book, on John Dewey, will be published in 2018 by the University of Chicago Press. Jacob holds the position of Professor and is the Director of the Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice as well as the Executive Director of Exhibitions and Exhibition Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Merete Røstad is a visual artist, lecturer, and curator whose projects are rooted in examinations of publics, collective memory, remembrance, and archives. Frequently engaging with public space and communities, her process-based practice explores our everyday exchanges with the histories inscribed in our surroundings, and how we come to read the traces that are left behind. During the course of her fellowship, Røstad initiated the projects Peoples Palace, Positions of Protest, and Chamber. Each examines the social and political significance of site as a starting point for thinking about collective memory of place, and to activate alternative modes of memorialisation in public space. Røstad holds an MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies program from Bauhaus University and a BA in Fine Arts from Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally in public space, festivals, galleries, and museums. Røstad lives and works in Berlin and Oslo and is currently an Artistic Research Fellow in the department of Arts and Crafts at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

The seminar and the publication are both free.

Entrance to the Lecture Hall of the Munch Museum from 13.30.

The seminar will be held in English.

15 September

The Munch Museum

Time: 14.00 - 17.00