About Collecting.

About Collecting.
A collaborative collage

by Rosalie Lorenz

This project is about critically discussing the collecting activities of museums in groups. What is collected, by whom, how and why? What happens to an object as soon as it comes into the possession of a museum? Where do the objects in the collections of Viennese museums / of museums in your city come from? Who is represented and who is not? Together, the participants explore these questions and digitally compile their “findings” in a collaborative collage.

Based on the works “The Letter” (2019) by Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, “Strategies of Visibilization” (2021) by Claudia Sandoval Romero, and “Dear Sir, I Regret to Inform You…” by Rajkamal Kahlon, participants will have the opportunity to critically engage with the museum as an institution. A main focus is on the activity and task of collecting. What do the collections of a museum reveal about it? How do they relate to society, to politics? What does provenance mean? What is restitution?

Throughout this assignment, students research independently, learn institutional critique and how to apply it, and practice collaborative research and joint artistic work by means of collecting, discussing, and communicating different topics in the form of a whiteboard presentation.

  • Input: discussion of the works
    • “The Letter” (2019) by Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński
    • “Dear Sir, I regret to inform you…” by Rajkamal Kahlon.
    • “Strategies of Visibilization” (2021) by Claudia Sandoval Romero
  • Collaborative filling of the whiteboard:
    • Freewriting exercises
    • Independent research on a discourse about restitution and provenance issues
    • Posing questions
  • Achieving first “research results” in small groups
  • Presenting and reflecting
A detail of a digital whiteboard shows ongoing research with different post-its, connecting lines and notes. The research titled “ABOUT COLLECTING” addresses questions of representation, power and ownership in museum collections.
About Collecting. A collaborative collage

About Collecting. Eine kollaborative Collage. © 2022 by Rosalie Lorenz is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Rosalie Lorenz, studies at the Department Art and Education, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Author’s Encouragement
The Miro whiteboard app is simple to use – you can brainstorm together, share research results, collect questions, link Google searches, etc. in no time at all. This makes Miro a powerful tool for collaborative work, also in distance learning.