Reactivating ARTIUM’s Collection

Introduction

In the winter of 2010, Mar Villaespesa and Joaquín Vázquez from BNV Producciones invited me to participate in the curatorial project Stanzas. Restitutive Practices on the ARTIUM Collection in the Basque Museum-Center of Contemporary Art, situated in the city of Victoria-Gasteiz, in northern Spain. ARTIUM had commissioned these two independent curators an exhibition to critically reflect on its collection after one decade of institutionalization. Villaespesa and Vázquez (2011) founded the project on Agamben’s (1992) Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, and more specifically in the argument that a work of art contains a potentiality beyond its moment of creation; a potentiality which is understood as an act of decreation, and constitutes the very life of the work of art, its possibilities of readership, translation, discussion, and the enabling of a multiplicity of readings.

ARTIUM is the most recently formed collection of contemporary art in a Spanish state-owned museum, its central body is formed by conceptual and political art from recent decades; artistic projects that actively engaged in philosophical and political ruptures. Its institutionalization in a museum space that privileges experiences of decontextualized opticality (aesthetic autonomy), and that strips works of art from their extended cultural and intellectual linkages, was seen by Villaespesa and Vázquez (2011) as something problematic and worthy of investigation.

Their approach connected with the critical theory frameworks of feminism and institutional critique. They questioned how the function of art is established beyond originality and authorship, how this function can instead involve collective imagination, and how its depoliticization can be reversed. In this respect, Villaespesa and Vázquez (2011) envisioned Stanzas as a number of collaborative curatorial exercises with four independent cultural workers (individuals and collectives) with the goal to produce restitutive practices:

[B]earing in mind the etymology of the term “restitute” (to restore something to its former state or position), we have developed what we term restitutive practices, in other words, our aim is to take a number of important works in the ARTIUM Collection and restore their potential. [This is to] be achieved through certain curatorial exercises based on the premise of activation. (p. 30)

The exhibition format of Stanzas had different parts that unfolded at different moments:

I collaborated on the curation of Stanza 4. This article reflects on the process and aforementioned moments of research, design, and activation.

Prosthetic Museum Pedagogy: The Time-Image and Its Paradoxical Modes of Address

When Villaespesa and Vázquez invited me to the project Stanzas, they did so with the understanding that I could envision and set in motion a restitution of select works from ARTIUM’s collection through practices of critical pedagogy and audience engagement. In response to these expectations, my curatorial proposal sought to create, both in the space of the exhibition and in its moment of activation, through the Laboratory of logics of vision that followed, an “experimental involvement with difficult knowledge” (Trafí-Prats, 2011, p. 38). This is knowledge that defies representation, closure, or museum control of knowledge (Frenkel, 2007). In this respect, central questions in my initial research included the following:

These questions were inquired through a philosophical framework that included Ellsworth’s (1997) concept of paradoxical modes of address and Deleuze’s (2010) concept of the time-image. Since The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art by Charles Garoian (2013) was released 2 years after the finalization of Stanzas, I cannot say that it directly inspired the project. In this respect, what I try to do in this foundational section is what Ellsworth (1997) denominates reading through, which is to put these three texts together to construct new possibilities of interpretation, and conceptualization of this research project in its aftermath.

For Garoian (2013), a prosthetic museum pedagogy centers on the criticality of subjectivity as fostered through art research. Criticality of subjectivity, understood as intellectual curiosity, capacity of association, and risk taking to move from what is familiar into what is new. Such pedagogy is considered prosthetic because it happens in a space of continuous addition and extension. It is constituted by “associative, yet indeterminate relationships between our individual, private memories and the corporate and public memory of the museum” (p. 84). It is prosthetic because it supplements what is lacking in institutional narratives, but it also produces excess, and slippages of meaning that resist being incorporated. Therefore, understanding occurs in an interstitial space making knowledge “contingent, fragmented, strange, unknown, grotesque, indeterminate, and undecidable” (p. 86). This challenges the unity or fixity of any cultural narrative, such as for example the narrative of ARTIUM’s Collection.

Garoian argues that prosthetic pedagogy is embodied in the sense that it entails a negotiation with disparate, fragmented, and unfamiliar bodies of knowledge. This potentially can bring the subject to a sense of disequilibrium, and a crisis of understanding. By connecting with the theories of Jean Piaget, Garoian suggests that this disequilibrium holds the capacity to create deeper levels of understanding in which knowledge is reorganized in new schemas.

This transformative aspect of the prosthetic resonates with how Deleuze (2010) describes the workings of the time-image. The time-image comes from the outside and holds the power to shock our assumed clichés. A cliché is an understanding of the image that is reductive. It occurs when a spectator sees less than what the image offers to be seen due to personal, economic, and cultural perspectives that mediate her experience. Like prosthesis, the time-image makes this transformation possible via reorganizations of the image:

Sometimes it is necessary to restore the lost parts, to rediscover everything that cannot be seen in the image, everything that has been removed to make it “interesting.” But sometimes, on the contrary, it is necessary to make holes, to introduce voids, and white spaces, to rarify the image, by suppressing many things that have been added to make us believe that we are seeing everything. (p. 21)

The time-image is an image that occurs in a situation of discontinuity or shock within a diachronic or cause-logic narrative. It reveals “how time is a process of becoming which affords a temporal perspective of images that problematizes classical philosophy’s categorizations of ‘truth’ and the ‘reality’ of the world” (Colman, 2011, p. 180). The time-image suspends time, amplifies the moment, and situates the spectator in a state of indeterminacy, in which the more she looks, the more she is compelled to reconstitute the image, becoming increasingly conscious that she is looking (Cowie, 2011).

The time-image is a composite, and an expression of different layers of time, including the interval between virtual time (past) and actual time (present) within the same image, and in this sense prosthetic. The time-image creates interdependences between subjective memories, dreams, perceptions, and the actuality or course of events. In the time-image, learning occurs in an expanded space where, “Time provides access to thinking, to the very nature of being, and the forms it takes and can take, through expression on screen” (Colman, 2011, p. 145). Learning is not about mimesis or realism but about possibility.

What modes of address enable prosthetic understanding in the museum? According to Ellsworth (1997), a mode of address is an invisible pedagogical relation between educator and student, museum and visitor. It has to do with the cultural and social power that forms and deforms who the museum thinks visitors are, who the visitors think they are, and the possible misfits, lacks, and failures in the dialogs between the two. While Ellsworth identifies a predominance in education of modes of address that pre-fix knowledge and understand learning as a repetition of the same, she is more interested in modes of address that multiply and mobilize teaching and learning positions, thus enlarging the possibilities of response, and meaning making.

In advocating for finding these mobilizing modes of address outside education, Ellsworth looks to contemporary film. She argues that there are films, like Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985), that function as instances of critical art pedagogy, presenting partial histories, resisting a mimetic function, and constructing forms of cultural dialog that instead of repeating the same, function in self-reflexive ways bringing both the characters and the spectators back to knowledge that they tend to ignore, marginalize, and displace. This is what Ellsworth (1997) calls “the return of a difference” (p. 147). These are films that perform address as paradox, that bring an open logic of possibility. In this logic, audiences look without reason or final outcome, transformative teaching or learning happens without authority.

Such paradoxical modes of address are also identifiable in the forms of thinking that the time-image propels. The time-image emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War, in devastated countries and societies experiencing deep transitions, mostly in Europe and Japan. In this respect, the films of the time-image do not propose final solutions, their characters and narratives appear confronted by problems but are unable to find definitive responses to them. The world is shocking, confusing, and many times unbearable for these film characters. As a result, the time-image engages the viewer in a form of seeing or knowing that connects with the transformative aspects of the prosthetic:

A form of seeing that is not bound to what one has learned to see or been told to see. It is we may say, the experience of seeing something as though for the first time, so what one is seeing is not on the basis of what one already knows, but instead on the basis of what it is unknown. (Rushton, 2012, p. 62)

In the same way that Garoian (2013) sees prosthetic pedagogy as leading to deeper levels of understanding, the characters in these films of the time-image emerge from daunting and disorienting situations with a renewed way of seeing the world, and amplified consciousness (Rushton, 2012).

Researching ARTIUM’s Collection

For Stanza 4, I selected three artworks from ARTIUM’s collection that engaged difference, ambiguity, and memory. These works were The salt of the sea (2006) by Alfredo Jaar; We will all die (2003) by Mikel Eskauriaza; and Limpieza social (2006) by Regina José Galindo. My research reflected on how these artworks connected to and expanded the concept of the time-image.

The salt of the sea (2006) by Alfredo Jaar (Figure 1) shows a slightly changing image 12 times organized in a grid structure. There is a footbridge into a marina on top of which lays a large screen. Projected on this screen, we see a monumental close-up of a Black woman’s face. She is crying. We are confronted with what Deleuze (2010) calls an affection-image, which occurs in the interval between perception and action (Colman, 2011). Deleuze’s (1978) considers affect as a form of thought that encounters a body altering the course of its actions or movements. Put in filmic terms, the affection-image, “gives a proper consistency to the possible, it expresses the possible without actualizing it, whilst making it a complete mode . . . it is a quality or power, it is potentiality considered for itself as expressed” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 98).

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Figure 1.

Alfredo Jaar, The salt of the sea, 2006, ARTIUM de Álava, Vitoria-Gasteiz. Depósito Juan Bonet Gambins, © Gert Voor in’ t Holt.

The salt of the sea presents a number of stills that capture a screening of the film Muxima (2005) that Jaar produced during a trip to Angola. To construct this image, Jaar chose the moment in the film showing the testimony of a woman narrating how her daughter had been missing for a number of years as a result of civil war. The screen has been placed against an open space somewhere on the Angolan shore of the Atlantic Ocean.

Deleuze and Guattari (2005) argue that faces are culturally produced by “an abstract machine of faciality” (p. 168) that functions in a double-coded system, the “white wall” of the signifier, and the “black hole” of subjectivity (p. 168) that is a process of facialization that deterritorializes the face from the whole organism of the body, its actions, and historical contexts. There is nothing human in this process. It is machinistic and unconscious. It simplifies nuance, creates abstraction and sameness. Does The salt of the sea merely function as the facialization of a face and a landscape?

No, there is more. The salt of the sea does not bring “absolute deterritorialization” (p. 174) as faciality does. Besides a face, and a landscape, there is the passage of the footbridge to the screen, which implies a third space, one of viewing, of being confronted with a signifier, and the face crying while projected on a screen erected in front of the sea. Homi Bhabha (1994) described this third space as “the enunciatory disorder of the colonial present . . . [that] lies in the staging of the colonial signifier in the narrative uncertainty of culture’s in-between: between sign and signifier, neither one nor the other” (p. 180).

The salt of the sea alludes to this enunciatory disorder resisting to fix representation, through a hybrid space made up of the aforementioned arrangement of elements that opens up a relationship with a radical other. Griselda Pollock (2008) states, “Alfredo Jaar’s work is not the production of images, but the creation and choreographing of the viewer’s encounter with and reflection upon the encounter with images in an image-saturated culture structured about its unprocessed relation to Africa” (p. 132). The salt of the sea choreographs, to use Pollock’s expression, an arrangement that puts us beyond the colonial tropes that have historically rendered a dehumanized view of Africa, either through the presentation of its compelling landscapes or through the deceased or mutilated bodies of war and hunger that cannot speak for themselves. Jaar’s affection-image is newness and possibility; it is both moving and confusing—the profound grief of a woman crying, but why is she crying? It fosters curiosity, the desire to see close up, and beyond the false obviousness of prevailing clichés. As mentioned earlier, an affection-image constructs a hinge between perception and action. And the action that The salt of the sea points to is a transformation of thinking. It compels the viewer to experiment with the difficulty of translation, to struggle with cultural authority, and the traumatic negotiation of one’s own identity when confronted with images of radical otherness and colonial history.

We will all die by Basque photographer Mikel Eskauriaza (2003) is a large format photograph presenting the geological cross-section of a generic space in the Basque mountains. We are shown a forest divided by a paved road. The cross-sectional view, typical of topographic photography, makes the cut inflicted by the construction of the road clearly visible and a central aspect of the picture. This section of the forest has a fence, which indicates that it is a private estate. There are also few electrical cables crossing the image, and in the center of this space, a large banner hangs with the statement Vamos a Morir (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Mikel Eskauriaza, We will all die, 2003, ARTIUM de Álava, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Colección Ipiña-Bidaurrazaga, © Gert Voor in’ t Holt.

Following the logic of the time-image, We will all die accesses different modalities of time through topos, or an arrangement of things that come together due to a matter of localization. Deleuze (2010) brings the notion of topology to the study of the image because he is interested in how the different points of the image as space are presented and interconnected in a given fashion (the mountain, the road, the cables, the phrase, privatization, the cross-sectional view . . . ). “Topologies are formed,” says Deleuze, “by the redistributed, coexistent, transformed and fragmented forms” (pp. 119-120). By the act of stopping in this indifferent space and placing a banner, We will all die plants what Deleuze calls a “crystalline seed” (p. 74), which coalesces actual and virtual time as inseparable in a circuit. The actual time of the forest as seen from the road with a banner hanging is inseparable from the virtual time of the thoughts and memories that this space might evoke. What happened to this place? Why is the forest, a significant cultural ecosystem for the Basques, presented in this indistinctive, violated, and privatized space? Whose voice is speaking? Who is going to die? Should the phrase “We will all die” be attributed to someone or something? Who is included in this we?

Eskauriaza’s art connects with the critique of unitary urbanism in which artists of the Situationist International engaged in the 1960s. These artists questioned the dominance of functionalism in the creation and use of public spaces, and advocated instead for playful uses and interventions. They also criticized the compartmentalization of art in institutions and its detachment from social practice. Like Situationist artists, Eskauriaza’s artwork engages in tactics of détournement, which is a recontextualization of a work of art, image, or literary message to enact radical shifts both in the work and the public context. Eskauriaza does this by inserting messages in humanly modified environments to reorganize visions and relations with these spaces that move us away from indifference and toward difference. Like Deleuze’s crystalline seed, We will all die creates new circuits of relations between the physical and the mental; the real and the imaginary; past, present, and future; and actuality and possibility. The crystal is where “the expression of time coalesces, and the image both expresses and produces a composite (time-image) of different layers of time, and different signs of time” (Colman, 2011, p. 135).

In this sense, We will all die situates the viewer in a “time abyss,” enabling her to “see time in the crystal” (Deleuze, 2010, p. 78), situating her in a threshold, a liminal point in which to imagine that something that now exists will disappear. It opens the possibility of reflexivity and recollection in a world that seems silent, anesthetized, and indifferent.

Limpieza social (Social cleaning) by Regina José Galindo (2006, Figure 3) consists of a video-still from a performance with the same title that the artist described in the following way: “I am given a bath with a high-pressure hose, a method used to pacify demonstrations and to bath prison inmates.” ¹ Some films of the time-image, such as for instance the ones directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, introduced a new type of character who embodied the states of dislocation and disintegration of the surrounding world. Antonioni presented these characters in an objective way, approaching them

. . . from the outside, so that one thing we can say about these characters is that they are not self-willed or self-defined; they are not ‘subjects’ in the strong sense in which we might understand that term. If they have traits of human subjectivity, then these traits are the ones defined by the other people and objects, the spaces and situations with which they come into contact or which they occupy. (Rushton, 2012, p. 66)

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Figure 3.

Regina J. Galindo, Limpieza social, 2006 ARTIUM de Álava, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Depósito Juan Bonet Gambins © Gert Voor in’ t Holt.

The spaces, objects, and situations about which Rushton refers are similar to those presented in Limpieza social, a vacated space, a power-hose, and water against a body. It is a force that comes from the outside affecting a subject who is unable to act against it: “I am given a bath with a high-pressure hose . . . ”

As an artist living in Guatemala, a country with a recent history of more than 30 years of civil war, Galindo’s performance-based work embodies the silencing, and oblivion perpetrated on subjugated and erased territories and bodies. Galindo uses her body as a central resource to explore memory and the (dis)location of history from the point of view of the victims of extreme violence. In this respect, Limpieza social constitutes a political image, one that interrupts prevalent clichés and unquestioned cultural behaviors as looking at the pain of others and remaining indifferent (Sontag, 2004).

Galindo’s work provokes an encounter with radical dispossession and vulnerability, compelling the viewer to empathize with the other, raising an ethical question about the limits of what is culturally acceptable to look at, and the use of estrangement and discomfort as critical resources.

Design of the Exhibition Space

Right at the first moment of Stanza 4, the research on the aforementioned artworks in ARTIUM’s collection opened a prosthetic space for looking beyond what was obvious in them, connecting visuality with theory, and as a result altering dominant ecologies of images that erase, dehumanize, and homogenize cultural and personal singularities. Such a space of learning raised questions about how others could encounter the potentialities of these three works of art in the format of a museum experience, and how the exhibition space could foster looking experiences that would not dissolve in pure contemplation but initiate mobilization and implication.

After researching the collection, our next task was to design the exhibition space for Stanza 4. As mentioned earlier, Villaespesa and Vázquez (2011) devised the exhibition space for the four stanzas as places of collective work and experience. They specifically referred to Bretch’s (1932) notion of Umfunktionierung, refunctionalization, elaborated in his essay “The radio as an apparatus of communication.” Bretch understood that if radio were to be a public medium, audiences ought to instruct as well as be instructed. Radio ought to reveal its distinctive public character by documenting and intervening directly within daily life. The idea of refunctionalization in museum education invokes audience participation, and their intervention in the public knowledge of museum collections and exhibitions in a similar way. It seeks a museum education centered on the institutional knowledge of artists, artworks and collections, and alliances of such knowledge with the cultural memories and personal experiences of the viewers (Garoian, 2013).

This idea of refunctionalizing the collection as pedagogy enabled me to consider that an exhibition like Stanzas, which encompasses different moments of activation perhaps did not require starting with a traditional display of the artworks. Viewers’ experiences and thinking in the time-image could be easily overlooked by traditional, chronological modes of display—what Deleuze (1986) refers to as the movement-image.

As Ellsworth (1997) suggests, a curriculum is never a direct journey. It never works linearly that by the end of a museum experience each participant learns according to the goals, ideas, and skills of the curator or the museum educator. Instead, oscillations, returns, folds, and failures constitute learning in the museum according to the time-image. The mode of address of the time-image is indirect. It allows for differential spaces between the museum’s curatorial curriculum and the responses of its visitors. To facilitate engagement with the open-ended, ambiguous, and difficult knowledge of the time-image, exhibition designs must cultivate uncertainty, and resist closure. As Frenkel (2007) suggests, “Difficult knowledge [should be] evoked rather than stated and made present to the imagination through a mix of absence, indirection, and incompleteness that brings the viewer out of passivity” (p. 122).

In this respect, Stanza 4 unfolded through two moments: An initial one that lasted several months where viewers encountered selected questions. These questions emerged indirectly from what I had learned through researching The salt of the sea, We will all die, and Limpieza social. Disconnected from the artworks and self-standing, the questions opened a space of potentiality for viewers’ multiple connections, extensions, and understandings; a multiplicity enabled similar to that of the time-image mode of address. These questions, which were printed in large typeface and installed on the exhibition walls in three languages (Euskera, Spanish, and English), were as follows:

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Figure 4.

Stanza 4, ARTIUM de Álava, Vitoria-Gasteiz, © Gert Voor in’ t Holt.

The viewers’ encounter with these questions constituted a prosthetic space where instruction was postponed and ignorance took place. I refer to ignorance in the sense that the space raised complex questions rather than easy answers. It enabled learning through connectivity by addressing the viewer and asking for her own ways of responding to the questions. Inspired by Rancière (1991), Garoian (2013) suggests that ignorance is a way

to postpone predetermined, academic teachings and allow for [visitors] playful observations, explorations, and improvisations . . . the positioning of ignorance constitutes a pedagogical strategy whereby both [museum educator] and [visitor] are emancipated to learn from and about each other. (p. 45)

Three pamphlets, one per question on the wall, emphasized the active role of viewers in considering their own responses. These pamphlets, which were placed on a table situated right below the questions on the wall, invited viewers to respond to such questions by either leaving or mailing the museum their own reactions in the form of text, visuals, or objects. The received responses were displayed on the walls of the exit hallway till the exhibition lasted. In addition, the pamphlet included a call for viewers interested in investigating connections between the questions in the wall and ARTIUM’s collection, and requested their participation in a Laboratory of logics of vision. In this way, the Laboratory of logics of vision became the activation moment of Stanza 4, when the three selected artworks from the collection came into play, which took place during the final week of the exhibition Stanzas.

Laboratory of Logics of Vision

The participants in the Laboratory of logics of vision were nine women who introduced themselves as visual artists, art students, art teachers, university professors, doctoral students, or just surviving through multiple part-time jobs. For the week of the Laboratory, we transformed the exhibition space into a study room, and installed a table to work on with our computers, texts, images, and bodies.

The Laboratory aimed to map the group’s collective thinking on the three questions, the three selected artworks, and theory related to the time-image. On the mornings previous to each session, I worked in the exhibition space rereading and editing my notes, and the videos of the sessions. I transcribed central ideas and fragments of our conversations and mapped how meaning was networked and flowed through the group as a collective (Bohm, 2012). I concentrated on moments when co-creation, reassessment, and suspension of meaning took place through exchanges involving multiple participants. As conversations are contingent and ephemeral, happening in a fast pace, and could be easily forgotten, I installed the emerging map on the main wall of Stanza 4 where it expanded during the days of the Laboratory; its purpose being to build relevance and awareness of our collective process. As the Laboratory continued, the map became an important part of the Stanza 4 space, and remained on view through the last weekend that the exhibition was open to the public (Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

Laboratory of logics of vision map, courtesy of Laura Trafí-Prats.

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Figure 6.

Laboratory of logics of vision map (detail), courtesy of Laura Trafí-Prats.

As Ellsworth (1997) explains, paradoxical modes of address mobilize viewers by transforming the ways they connect theory and practice, provoking a reassessment of stuck ideas in renewed ways. The central aim of the Laboratory was to see how the visual logic of the time-image, its modes of address could enable this type of mobilization in museum education. The visual logic of the time-image can be summarized through three central ideas reviewed in the sections above:

Paradoxical Modes of Address in the Museum

In the months that followed, the research that emerged from the pedagogical experiment that took flight during the Laboratory, extended in multiple directions. I transcribed the sessions’ videos to enrich my rough field notes into thicker narratives, and to develop an analysis of the data based on Ellsworth’s (1997) theory of learning as a scene of address.

The concept “scene of address” comes from film studies. It is not necessarily the moment when we are watching the film in question. It is the moment when relations between the film and its spectators shape through time, and amplify cultural connections. Ellsworth finds a correspondence between the scene of address and psychoanalysis. An analyst knows when the process of interpretation starts, but cannot control when and how it progresses and finalizes. The analyst

. . . speaks back from the position of [the patient’s] resistances, stuck places, active ignore-ances, sets into motion an asymmetrical dynamic between client and analysts . . . The analyst responds to the client’s questions, but not from the place to which those questions are addressed. (Ellsworth, 1997, p. 69)

If we introduce these ideas into a model of museum education centered on learning through the time-image, we see how the visual logic of the time-image brings into awareness something new, something that we do not yet know, like the scenes of address in a process of psychoanalysis and in the films of the time-image. The time-image engages in a process of becoming that alters what is true and real. It situates the viewer in a crisis of understanding, and eventually generates new forms of thinking (Colman, 2011; Deleuze, 2010).

In what follows, I concentrate on two scenes of address that occurred during the Laboratory. In these scenes, understanding was resisted, and questions prevailed upon certainties. They constituted key moments of learning through the time-image in the museum, breaking the illusion that dialogic learning and a sense of collectivity could occur without discontinuity, ruptures, and rejections.

Time-Images

In the final two sessions of the Laboratory, we centered on the artifacts and narratives that the participants brought and wrote in response to one of the three questions of Stanza 4. The goal was to use them as a starting point to construct a time-image, an image that encompassed different layers of time. I suggested a do-it-yourself approach, and we utilized readily available technology—cameras in cell phones, software in our own computers, or other devices that the participants had at home. In the following sections, I review two of the time-images that students produced.

Conclusion

In this article, I have outlined a number of ideas and practices on how the time-image and its paradoxical modes of address may contribute to Garoian’s (2013) project for a prosthetic pedagogy in museums. The multifaceted characteristics of the time-image, together with its commitment to the representation of difficult knowledge, connect with non-linear modes of address that incorporate ambiguity, resistance, and silences as important elements structuring the relations between viewers, museum exhibitions, and resulting representations of knowledge.

The open-logic and indirectness of the time-image, reveals that representation is always prosthetic, it is neither one, nor exact, but holds the potential for multiple interpretations and the impossibility of being complete or fully controlled. The time-image calls for emancipated viewing experiences and risk-taking at the museum that consist in ways of interconnecting “the public memory of the museum . . . with the private memories of learners,” and as a result of this “an anxiety of disequilibrium occurs at their border, a crisis of understanding that augments their respective regimes of knowledge” (Garoian, 2013, p. 84).

The time-image and its modes of address are powerful resources for reactivating contemporary artworks and collections that have gone through processes of dramatic institutionalization and depoliticization. For reactivation to happen, however, it is imperative that museum educators invite visitors’ performances of subjectivity as critical resources with which to create connections between different forms of knowledge and what is yet-to-be-known. Disequilibrium, shock, estrangement should be considered as learning moments not to be avoided, resolved, or sensed as failures, but observed as central elements of cultural interpretation that may lead to renewed ways of seeing the world.