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25.09.15

The Museum As…

Time: Saturday, 3 October, 2015 from 10:00-17:30
Venue: Nicolas Sursock Museum, Beirut, Lebanon

Doors open at 9:45, followed by a welcoming ceremony with an introduction by Zeina Arida at 10:00 in the Level 2 Auditorium.

Four panel discussions will occur over the course of the day. At each panel there will be a total of three speakers who have a strict 15 minute time limit to present their focus of choice. The time constraint intends to allow for an in-depth question and answer portion between audience members and participating speakers, followed by a panel discussion.

Panel One addresses Architecture, with an introduction by George Arbid.
Speakers include Antoine Chaaya, Jacqus Abou Khaled and Corinne Diserens.

Panel Two addresses Building Public Spaces and Collections, with an introduction by Marie Muracciole.
Speakers include Suzanne Cotter, Francois Cheval and Bisi Silva.

Panel Three addresses Public Interest and Private Funding, with an introduction by Zeina Arida.
Speakers include Suha Shoman, Lina Chidiac and Salwa Mikadadi.

Panel Four addresses The Museum As…, with an introduction by Nora Razian.
Speakers include Arthub’s Davide Quadrio, Akram Zaatari and Jesus Carrillo.


Arthub Founder and Director Davide Quadrio will expound on his paper The Museum as an experience, in which he specifically addresses Aurora Museum—a frequent collaborator and host institution of Arthub curated exhibitions.

Arthub and Aurora’s communion began in 2013 from the Xinlu (New Roads), a long-term project initiated with Querini Stampalia, commissioned by the Museum and orchestrated by the curatorial expertise of Arthub. Since then, Xinlu has inaugurated a series of artistic interventions aimed at connecting the outstanding collection of Aurora Museum with contemporary art. The first curatorial project of this series was The Unicorn and the Dragon, a solo show by artist Qiu Zhijie, presented during the 55th Venice Biennale.

The Aurora Museum poignantly juxtaposes their extensive antique collection with contemporary works presented by Arthub.

Davide Quadrio on The Making Of…
In this perfectly harmonious shrine of the past, contemporary art is now called to dialogue with the collection, creating a meta-level of discussion that will scatter the seeds for the upcoming future of the Aurora Museum. The institution is planning a Contemporary department that will be located in the Aurora Office building, facing the already extant museum devoted to Antiques.

After journeying through the impressive space at Aurora, exploring level after level of Chinese antiquity, preserved in unspotted glass vitrines, visitors reach the top floor of the exhibiting space to find themselves in the Buddhist section of the collection, standing across from the majestical Shanghainese landscape.

The architecturally transcendent Museum allows for a peaceful viewing of contemporary exhibitions such as The Making of A Museum, a group show, inaugurated in November 2014, expressing the institution’s will of consciously shaping a new idea of museum. This meditative state of reflection was also achieved in the recent exhibition Nobody Knows Where by Zhang Enli and Christopher Doyle, which allowed for a constructive connection between a filmmaker and a visual artist; the two artists worked together to create a new language within the context of the Museum.

Four years ahead of the opening of the Contemporary Museum, Aurora and Arthub are building content and defining practice, dialoguing with the already existing facilities as well as shifting to other countries and places, producing new artworks, exploring the antique collection as the conceptual inception and, yet, as destination of the curatorial journey.

Join Davide in Beirut to discuss the journey he has chosen to take with the illustrious Aurora Museum; help shape the ideas of both Arthub and Aurora, to define what a Museum should be and how it should come into creation.