"Rhizome of Relations": Unfolding the Potential of the Modern Museum

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In the highly regulated spaces of most museums today, is it possible to enact a different type of experience, one that is relational, participatory, and even aspirational? Can the public be just as important as the artist and curator in the process of making an aesthetic experience meaningful? Museum director Karen Grøn believes so. And she has made it her mission to make the Trapholt Museum of Art and Design a refreshingly novel site of co-creation, where the visitors and guards are just as instrumental as all the other moving parts. She sees art as a moving rhizome of relations and materialities — an “infrastructure of meanings” — and the museum as offering a frame which opens a piece of art to the question of why. Far from being simplistic, her process is always theoretically informed, whether by enaction itself or Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance, and it coaxes the visitor into experience itself, rather than telling them about the experience they ought to have. The result is a space in which the community feels a strong personal tie to the museum, almost as a second home, in which they can “unfold their potential for participating in the world.” And that, if anything, is what Karen aspires to, and why she thinks this enterprise remains as vital and relevant as ever. 

Karen Grøn is Museum director and curator of collaborative art projects at the Trapholt Museum of Modern Art, Craft and Design in Kolding, Denmark. She explores and researches how to make the arts accessible and relevant to multiple citizens through engagement and exchange. Karen has a master’s degree in Aesthetics and Culture from the University of Aarhus and a master’s in public management from the University of Southern Denmark. In 2005-2006, Karen was a guest researcher at the University College London, and then in 2018-2019, at the Tate Museum.

If you’d like to read a bit more about her unique approach, you can peruse an article she contributed to the Tate Museum website: The Art Museum and Psychological Well-being. You can also hear her speak at the 2020 EU Presidency Museum Conference, on “Museums and Social Responsibility - Values revisited”. Finally, we'd encourage you to have a look at the fourth semester of Core Enaction, in which Karen was in dialogue with enactive researcher and artist Shay Welch. 

For more information about Trapholt’s current exhibition, “Feel Me,” which Karen mentions in our conversation, you can visit the Trapholt Museum Website.  

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