Contemporary Art Heritage Flanders - CAHF

Info

CAHF is a collaborative knowledge platform of four Flemish contemporary art museums: S.M.A.K. (Ghent), Mu.ZEE (Ostend), M HKA & Middelheimmuseum (Antwerp)

Geschiedenis

As the number of museums around the world increases at an accelerated rate, the need for a critical discussion and investigation around alternative institutional models for contemporary art collections has become increasingly more relevant. Museums are now questioning their collecting methodology, positioning, and identity. What is an ideal size for a municipal museum? How are museums collecting today? And how do institutions locally deal with global shifts?

CAHF is a unique multifaceted structure that responds to these questions, taking a trans-local, multi-organizational structure that is geographically spread throughout Flanders. Its framework combines and connects its 4 partnering museums: S.M.A.K. (Ghent), Mu.ZEE (Ostend), M HKA & Middelheimmuseum (Antwerp) and addresses the need for exchange, interaction and provocation on how to think and practice contemporary collecting.

As an active component of these museums, CAHF identifies individual inquiries and areas of engagement that derive out of their collection acquisition, conservation, research and exhibition methodologies. Later CAHF takes on these inquiries and further develops them into cross-sectional scenarios/platforms that involve the museums and their international peers through internal and external programming (both operational as content-driven), discursive events, exhibitions and publications.

As an autonomous platform CAHF maintains both an internal and external position. A non-dualistic approach that can be both internally involved with all 4 institutions, while also maintaining an external perspective. This allows CAHF to respond to the museum’s individual mission, but at the same time identifying areas of discontinuity and divergence amongst their systems, opening them up as a space for discourse.

Important to this approach is the recognized benefit of having 4 museums work together in representing a united front, addressing a larger conversation on collecting, alongside issues around museological practice, representation, and local/international audience engagement. Utilizing unique qualities from each of these institutions and collections such as size, location and history, CAHF attempts to put forward a potential model for multi-collaborative institutional structures that rather than an exercise in cost-efficiency or increase in scale, affirms the individuality and size of its partners, allowing them to partake in an international arena.