In 2021 the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent (S.M.A.K.) asked more than 400 young people to curate an exhibition on the museum's first floor. What followed was a rollercoaster for the museum and its staff. Colleagues who would otherwise not be in contact with visitors, were now working together with outspoken youngsters. The result was an exhibition that challenged the visitors and the staff to look at art differently. The visitor's experience was redefined through innovative elements such as labyrinths, lifeguard chairs, and interactive activities. For this exhibition, called The Exhibition, the museum received The Art Museum Award by the European Museum Academy (EMA) in 2023.
Start with WHY?
S.M.A.K wants to be at the forefront of what happens in the contemporary art scene, to challenge the contemporary art professional and enthusiast, while at the same time staying as accessible and inclusive as possible to a diverse audience, who perhaps has less prior knowledge of contemporary art and is visiting our museum as an interested, but unprepared leisure seeker. Add to this the growing challenge to build connections with a diverse local community. This challenge is sometimes viewed as some sort of gymnastic split. Can a museum, especially a contemporary art museum, do it all? Be accessible and challenging to its visitors at the same time? Or does this question mainly worry the museum professional rather than the visitor? Is being accessible mutually exclusive with being challenging? This 'Split ’of needs and expectations, for visitors as well as for the professional, is called into question by S.M.A.K. with a project like 'The Exhibition'. The jury of EMA praised the museum for our long tradition of taking on social responsibility and creating a dialogue with civil society. They endorsed S.M.A.K. for our risktaking and going beyond the boundaries of traditional museum practice, to achieve our aims. With our international collection and daring programme of temporary exhibitions we put the living artist at the heart of an innovative, inclusive and outstanding participatory policy that aims at making the best of contemporary art accessible to a public as diverse as possible.
Kurt Stockman
Next step: how do you do it?
As most museums, S.M.A.K. has a substantial amount of young people visiting, but only as school groups, not during their free time. The museum is making a considerable effort to reduce the potential barriers for young people, although without much visible results so far. It could be that, as stated by Nina Simon (The Art of Relevance, 2018), if you observe that a certain group is not coming, despite the different initiatives, it may be necessary to consider an altogether different approach and start to change the museum itself.
So we started wondering what would happen if we gave youngsters the opportunity to take over half of the museum? Can the museum put its professional biases and assumptions aside, listen to the wishes of its youngest visitors and still have a professional and artistic outcome? Or will the process be more interesting than the result? Or should we speak of a new kind of Split: one in which the process and the result can be equally important and excellent in quality? It became a cross-disciplinary project that made us think and act differently about participation projects. Before this ambitious project we already made a collection catalogue tailored to young audiences. One of the main keys to success in creating products aimed at a particular target group is that you cannot do it without their input. Hence the decision to make this "small catalogue of the collection of S.M.A.K.", written together with children between the ages of 7 and 12. For an entire school year, they visited the museum every week and researched our collection. The catalogue texts were written based on the conversations the children had with museum staff. The book was a hit. Even adult readers enjoyed reading it because of the approachable way it spoke about contemporary art, which is still often perceived as complicated. We used this catalogue as a starting point.
Result: A new model for the future
Our first step was to search for young people, and we found them where they would naturally hide: in a local youth centre. Together with the professional youth workers, we issued a vacancy for a of a core group of ten young people who wanted to commit to working as external curators for over a year. It was important that they would receive compensation for their professional work. This shows how much the museum valued their work and confirmed its importance and validation.
Dirk Pauwels
They followed a training in the various domains of the museum: the artistic department, production team, communication, and audience mediation. To achieve this, a cross-departmental team was formed from the various domains of expertise within the museum in order to guide them during their trajectory. From the various workshops and brainstorming sessions, both digital and live in the museum, the idea emerged to work on looking at and experiencing contemporary art differently. Different from what the youngsters had experienced so far from their visits to museums, which in their words "are mainly aimed at old people". Thus entered a clever concept about looking at art differently, which gave the opportunity to explore guiding the visitors throughout a labyrinth inside the museum walls, with artworks presented at every turn, sometimes in a non-traditional way. and at a different level than we would normally exhibit them. The visitors could relax in beanbags while looking at artworks or explore how everything would look if you would stand on a lifeguard chair or climb on a jungle gym. At the heart of the exhibition we installed a laboratorium where you could make your own artwork and share it with the other visitors. It was also possible for schools to make a reservation to use this as their classroom of the day.
To ensure that it was not only the voice of this smaller group of young curators that was heard, the museum made the decision to collaborate with five different schools throughout the city, with different cultural and educational backgrounds. Each student, between the ages of four and nineteen, were asked the same five questions, which were of course accompanied by an appropriate methodology for each age group.
The result was a diverse exhibition about how young people look at art that was interesting for a broad audience.
How to move from an occasional, integrated approach to common practice?
S.M.A.K. believes that our experiment proves the importance of believing in the knowledge and power of youngsters. Although there are also many insightful moments to take away from our experimental project. For the first time the museumstaff worked in a transversal team, with its own learning curve. The main goal was to engage youngsters in visiting the museum, by change up the museum together with them.
S.M.A.K. wants to inspire other institutions by our exploration of bridging accessibility and artistic depth, fostering inclusivity, and building connections with diverse communities. Ultimately, our endeavour exemplifies how museums can cultivate a passion for art among young audiences, fostering inclusivity and innovation. In reimagining the museum as a dynamic space for dialogue, experimentation and community engagement.