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| Artist Statement | Exhibition History | | |
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The Movement Movement mobilizes hundreds of participants to run art institutions around the world (Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, 2006; Royal Ontario Museum, 2007; and Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2008). The Movement Movement performs a usual activity, running, in an unlikely place: a museum. The result is temporary and participatory public art that runs alongside a museum’s permanent collection.The performance is an orchestrated situation or set of conditions for impromptu community to form within a public institution. One condition involves mobilizing hundreds of individuals and social groups to congregate in a museum and participate in a choreographed sculpture. Running indoors is a second condition. It requires participants to break one of the fundamental rules of how we behave in the public sphere. Remember that first regulation of elementary school? “NO RUNNING in the hallway!” This playful transgression performed together breaks down social barriers allowing new relationships to form. People and place come together in an unexpected way to run an institution. The third condition is the symbolic bestowal of the museum to The Movement Movement, from the initial moment of gaining permission to run the museum to working with the museum and its staff for months in advance. By being granted agency, the audience radically redefines its relationship with the institution and exercises a new one by literally running the museum. Here, social change is not only imagined but put into practice: if we can run a museum together what else can we run as a social body? Exhibition
History Publications
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