Contemporary art challenges standard notions and conduct in museums. Artworks such as installations, performances and digital art appear in changing iterations and their meaning is often conveyed through their intangible aspects, their biography and tacit knowledge of the artist and the museum. The unstable form of much contemporary art contributes to the fragmentation of the infrastructure that supports institutional memory. This raises a question central to this thesis: how do museums reconcile their documentation practices with artists' demands for the contextual integrity of their works in museum care?

To answer this question, Barok studies a range of initiatives for the production and exchange of documentation and research materials for the conservation of contemporary art, framing it as the relationship between digital platforms and the process of musealisation.

Barok concludes that the platforms used to facilitate the recontextualisation and perpetuation of works of art rest on a network of care. This network is facilitated and maintained by a host organisation, be it a collective or an institution. By spatially combining the aspects of exhibition display and research publishing, platforms can enable works to have a more active agency in social and institutional memory. Their collections are not necessarily tied to ownership, but rather to the right of use and presentation in the digital space. They offer an alternative view of musealisation that takes into account the distributed nature of an art object while maintaining the centrality of authentic documentation.

Platforms of care have the capacity to grant the artists, collaborators, caretakers and even institutions involved in continuing the work the status of primary witnesses, or living ‘authentic documentation.’

You can find UvA dissertations in the UvA-DARE database.