The Museum of Transformation

A Public Lecture by Davide Quadrio, Director, Museum of Asian Art, Turin, Italy

The lecture will be followed by conversation with Laura Vigo, Curator of Asian Art, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and Alice Ming Wai Jim, Professor of Contemporary Art, Concordia University.

A celebrated curator of contemporary Chinese art and cultural organizer for over thirty years, Davide Quadrio will share some insights on his experience as the director of MAO, the Museum of Asian Art in Turin, Italy.  Starting from the collection, its historical provenance and appearance in Turin, Davide will delve into the processes of historical and semiotic deconstruction, the rethinking of Asian so-called ethnographic collections with their complex stories of entanglement and biases based on a distinctive Western gaze. Denouncing the annihilation of non-Western ritual and religious objects through their musealization, Quadrio will end with his vision of a museum where these objects are reactivated -- and liberated -- through ad-hoc performative acts carried out by contemporary practitioners.

This event is organized by the South-South Working Group of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC)

The event is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Department of Art History, the Concordia University Research Chair in Critical Curatorial Studies and Decolonizing Art Institutions, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Montreal, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

View the PRESS RELEASE

How can you participate? Join us in person or online by registering for the Zoom Meeting or watching live on YouTube.

Have questions? Send them to info.4@concordia.ca

This event is conducted in English, but questions and comments are encouraged in English, French, Italian, or Mandarin