Conference by Kirsty Robertson

The Foundation, in collaboration with FOFA Gallery, is happy to invite you to the lecture Shadow Collection: Chemical Intimacies in the Museum and Archive by Kirsty Robertson, winner of the 2024 Research in Visual Arts award. The conference (in English) will take place on 13 March at 5:30 p.m. in York Auditorium (EV-1.605), EV Pavilion, Concordia University, and will be followed by a drink around the marble table.

Free admission

A few words about the conference

Museums are often described as “pristine” spaces. This is in part a reference to the apparent (but constructed) “neutrality” of the white cube, but is also due to what Fernando Domínguez Rubio calls the “aesthetic air” of the museum; the carefully controlled temperature and humidity levels and the filtration of unwanted particulate and pollutants from gallery environments. The production of environments that slow and intervene in the action of time on materials is typically considered to be a crucial role of museums. But as museum “neutrality” has come to be challenged, so too should any notion of the pristine museum space. This research develops a theory for the shadowy, feral underside of collections, focusing on toxic and chemical elements that often invisibly accompany material objects. The shadow collection includes, for example, DDT residues on natural history specimens, unidentified substances in artworks, chemicals used for pest control, arsenic in historical specimen preparations, and plasticizers migrating from degrading plastic artifacts. Feral plastics, fugitive toxic dust, and chemical legacies challenge the idea of museum purity, and profoundly impact the use, display, as well as the return/repatriation of documents, artefacts, artworks, and belongings. Through a series of short case studies on mylar, carpets, and synthetic textiles, PCBs in industrial collections, and polyurethane artworks, this talk reflects on how the shadow collection warps linear models of time and permanence in the museum.

Biography

Kirsty Robertson is the 2024 Research in Visual Arts award. She is Canada Research Chair in Museums, Art, and Sustainability and Professor and Director of Museum and Curatorial Studies in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University where she also directs the Centre for Sustainable Curating (CSC). Robertson has published widely on activism, visual culture and museums, culminating in her book Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Culture, Museums (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). Her new work focuses on small and micro- collections that repurpose traditional museum formats for critical and politically radical projects. A book titled Countering the Museum: The Non-Institution as a Site for Activism is in preparation for the Museums in Focus Series (Routledge). Robertson is a founding member of the Synthetic Collective, a group of artists, scientists and cultural researchers working on plastics pollution in the Great Lakes Region and project co-lead on A Museum for Future Fossils, an ongoing “vernacular museum” that responds curatorially to ecological crisis.