Who gets to design the future and who is left to maintain it? Groninger Museum’s new programme begins with this tension, placing care, labour, imagination and collective life alongside questions of authorship, architecture and institutional power. Under artistic director Roos Gortzak, contemporary art is being used not as another area of programming but as a means of looking again at the museum itself, and its collection, building and histories. Four exhibitions opening this September bring domestic labour into conversation with childhood, speculative fiction, ceramics and the archive, asking who has the authority to shape shared worlds and who is expected to keep them functioning. What makes the programme interesting is that it does not present experimentation as a new institutional virtue, but attempts to recover an unruly proposition: that a museum might be most relevant when it refuses to behave like a single thing.
That proposition places the programme within a longer history of feminist art and institutional critique, where the supposedly ordinary has repeatedly been used to expose the structures behind cultural value. Feminist artists from the 1960s onwards challenged the division between productive and reproductive labour, asking why making a work could be recognised as creative while cleaning, caring, organising and maintaining remained largely invisible. Frances Stark’s The Architect & The Housewife, the 1999 publication from which the flagship exhibition takes its title, provides a pointed framework for this imbalance, contrasting the person permitted to imagine and construct with the person expected to live within and maintain what has been made. Gortzak and curator Clare Molloy extend that question beyond the domestic sphere, turning it towards the museum and the labour that makes its supposedly public spaces possible. Yet there is an unresolved contradiction here that makes the exhibition more compelling: can an institution critique hierarchy of labour without itself converting those inequalities into cultural material?
Maintenance art offers one answer, precisely because it refuses the distinction between what counts as an artwork and what merely keeps things going. Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ practice is central to this history, having insisted that cleaning, repair and institutional upkeep could themselves become subjects of artistic attention. Nicole Wermers’ Reclining Female #2 brings a related unease into the gallery, placing a reclining female form alongside the functional presence of a housekeeping trolley. Its ambiguity matters: the domestic object has not been transformed into something entirely separate from work, but remains stubbornly connected to the labour it evokes. Around it, practices by Margaret Raspé, Alison Knowles, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Katie Schwab & Simon Worthington and Alida Pott widen the question of how making, repetition, use and care acquire value. Rather than resolving the politics of maintenance into a celebratory narrative, The Architect & The Housewifecan allow the discomfort to remain – particularly the possibility that once invisible labour becomes visible, it can also become aestheticised.
A different economy of value appears around the table, where usefulness and sociality complicate the status of the art object. Matthew Lutz-Kinoy and Natsuko Uchino’s Keramikos series treats ceramics not as isolated vessels but as carriers of relationships, rituals and histories, an approach embodied by Keramikos 2, a new acquisition comprising more than 300 pieces of dinnerware and accompanying tablecloths. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction supplies the conceptual frame, replacing the heroic spear – traditionally associated with action, conquest and individual agency – with the carrier bag as an instrument of gathering and carrying. The metaphor shifts the emphasis from the exceptional act to the things that accumulate around it: food, objects, stories, encounters and the often unremarked structures of collective life. Curated by Gortzak with guest curator Nicolas Trembley, Keramikos Carrier Bag extends this logic into the museum collection, bringing the artists’ ceramic series into associative contact with historical objects. What is being carried, in other words, is a different idea of how cultural history might be assembled.
Archives are rarely neutral containers, however, and Nieuw Licht 1: Ani Schulze – The Convent of Pleasuremakes their instability particularly visible. Curated by Molloy, the exhibition invites Schulze to work with the museum’s De Ploeg collection as something that can be reactivated, disrupted and made strange rather than simply preserved. Her experimental soap opera draws together historical and literary references while addressing exile, gender-based violence, surveillance technologies and the political possibilities of entertainment. Its title comes from Margaret Cavendish’s 1668 comedy, in which women establish a community outside conventional social structures, giving Schulze a historical fiction through which to imagine another form of collective existence. The point is not to make the past behave as evidence for the present, but to allow incompatible times and ideas to collide. In that sense, the archive becomes less a storehouse of authorised memory than a contested material that contemporary practice can pry open.
Alida Pott’s position within this process is revealing because her relative historical invisibility becomes part of the exhibition’s argument. As the first female member of De Ploeg, Pott offers a particularly pertinent connection to Schulze’s interest in gender, constructed characters and alternative forms of community, while her watercolours and puppet-making acquire renewed significance through the contemporary encounter. Research undertaken for the exhibition has brought further attention to Pott, suggesting that collections do not simply contain histories – they also contain the conditions through which some histories become easier to see than others. Schulze’s newly commissioned Episode 4: Harlequin’s Arrival pushes this re-reading into the museum itself, transforming its architecture into convent, ship and spaceship. Groningen-based performers, choreographers and dancers populate the work, alongside a giant stuffed rabbit whose absurdity prevents the historical references from settling into solemnity. Fiction here is not an escape from institutional history; it is a way of making that history unstable enough to be questioned.
Childhood introduces another challenge to established hierarchies of knowledge. Playing House, curated by Judith Spijksma, asks which rules children inherit, which they accept and which they might disobey, treating imagination as a political capacity rather than a decorative quality associated with youth. Mercedes Azpilicueta, afra eisma, Petrit Halilaj, Eva Koťátková, Lina Lapelytė, sophie serber and Ola Vasiljeva bring together practices spanning installation, performance, sculpture and textiles, while the Biennial Kids have been involved in developing the exhibition. Participation is often presented by museums as an uncomplicated good, but handing audiences a role does not necessarily mean handing them power. Playing House becomes more interesting when understood through that distinction, since its real test is whether young participants can do more than supply an institutional appearance of openness. The question is uncomfortable but necessary: what happens when an institution genuinely allows its younger audiences to alter the terms on which knowledge is produced?
Eva Koťátková’s practice is especially suited to this problem because it repeatedly exposes the rules governing bodies, behaviour and social interaction. Her interest in situations where conventions become visible through disruption makes participation less about entertainment than about noticing the structures that ordinarily pass without comment. Petrit Halilaj approaches related questions through memory, belonging and the imaginative construction of environments, while the wider group in Playing House unsettles the assumption that artistic meaning must originate with a singular, authoritative maker. Spijksma describes the exhibition in terms of sensory connections between human and more-than-human life, alongside questions about how collections are formed and programmes constructed. Such an approach places the children’s biennial within a wider debate about museums attempting to move from speaking to audiences towards working with them. Its success will depend less on how participatory it looks than on whether that redistribution of attention changes anything beyond the exhibition itself.
Architecture gives these questions a physical history. Groninger Museum’s 1994 building was designed by Alessandro Mendini alongside Philippe Starck, Michele de Lucchi and Coop Himmelb(l)au, with different architects responsible for distinct pavilions corresponding to parts of the collection. The result rejected the smooth institutional whole, making difference and fragmentation part of the museum’s identity rather than problems to be concealed. Its postmodern language is inseparable from the 1990s, yet the underlying proposition remains strikingly pertinent – different disciplines and forms of knowledge can occupy the same institution without being forced into one vocabulary. Returning to that structure is therefore not simply an exercise in institutional nostalgia. It raises a harder question about whether contemporary museums, despite their increasingly sophisticated language around interdisciplinarity, are actually comfortable with the disorder that genuine interdisciplinarity produces.
Collections extend that disorder across time. Groninger Museum holds more than 60,000 objects spanning five millennia, bringing modern and contemporary art into contact with design, cultural history and East Asian ceramics. Its histories include Fluxus, De Ploeg, Studio Alchimia and Memphis, traditions in which distinctions between art and everyday life were already under pressure. New acquisitions by Lutz-Kinoy and Uchino, Eglė Budvytytė and sophie serber, alongside Schulze’s commissioned work entering the collection, make the relationship reciprocal: contemporary artists are changing what the collection will mean in future. That matters because collecting is never an innocent act of accumulation; every acquisition also participates in deciding what deserves durability, visibility and institutional memory. A contemporary programme that interrogates those decisions is therefore doing something more consequential than refreshing the walls – it is testing the museum’s authority to determine what survives.
Curation becomes the connective tissue between these otherwise divergent propositions. Gortzak, Molloy and Spijksma have structured the opening programme as a set of overlapping questions rather than four isolated exhibitions, while Trembley’s contribution to Keramikos Carrier Bag reinforces the emphasis on exchange and multiple perspectives. Gortzak describes the programme as a continuation rather than a restart, returning to the experimental impulse associated with the museum’s origins while addressing present conditions. Molloy’s emphasis on long-form programming similarly suggests a slower institutional rhythm, in which questions can develop across time rather than being exhausted within a single opening season. Yet continuity should not be mistaken for innocence: to revive an institution’s radical history is also to decide which parts of that history remain useful, which need scrutiny and which have become myths. The programme’s strongest gesture may be its willingness to make the museum part of the argument.
Museums are increasingly expected to account for the labour behind culture, revisit inherited collections and redistribute authority, yet these ambitions can easily become another institutional aesthetic. Groninger Museum’s new programme is most persuasive when it refuses that neat resolution – a housekeeping trolley remains both sculptural object and reminder of work; a collection becomes both archive and battleground; participation raises as many questions about authority as it appears to solve. The building offers an unusually apt setting because its original fragmentation already resists the fantasy of a single institutional voice. Rather than imagining the future as a finished model, the exhibitions place competing ways of living, making, remembering and gathering in productive tension. What remains unresolved is precisely what gives the programme its edge: who gets to maintain the institution, who gets to change it, and whether those roles can ever be cleanly separated. Perhaps a museum for the future begins there – not with a new identity, but with a willingness to examine the work of making one.
Find out more about Groninger Museum’s new programme: groningermuseum.nl
Words: Simon Cartwright
Image Credits:
All images courtesy Groninger Museum.
