Changing Audience Expectations

Changing Audience Expectations. Developing a New Eloquence: Participation, Interactivity, and Immediacy

🗓️ Wednesday, June 17, 2026

10:00 am Toronto, Canada (EDT)
11:00 am São Paulo, Brazil (BRT)
4:00 pm Europe (CET)
7:30 pm Delhi, India (IST)

Abstract:

The pressure on visitor’s numbers has pushed the narrative towards numbers, but also has shaped the discourse towards the institution being a service delivery or an entertainer. Museums are communication systems and the meaning of the messages is co-created between the institution and the visitors. Addressing what to expect opens the institution towards many interesting discoveries: a space to interpret the art but also the real; a space where aesthetics and perception touches the ethical and existential dimensions of life and a radical space to reclaim personal and collective education. Museums are forces that too often are read by the media as too passive and yet, who wants the „activity“ of corporate media when it only contributes to the impoverishment of our public real? Reclaiming our function together with the audience implies convincing many communities to inhabit the museum and enjoy the politics of presence, face to face and responsible dialogue.

Guest Panelists:

Lydia Korndoerfer, Co-curator of “For Children”, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany.
Jorge Menna, Brazilian artist and researcher, Assistant Professor in the Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA at University of California, Santa Cruz.
Greer Valley, Senior Curator and Head of Curatorial Affairs, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), South Africa.

Moderated by Jochen Volz, Director of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil and CIMAM Board Member

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Sessions are recorded and posted in CIMAM's Members Only section for those who missed the time.

Biographies:

Lydia Korndoerfer

Lydia Korndoerfer is an art historian, author and curator. She holds a Master’s degree in Art and Visual History and studied at Humboldt University in Berlin and the University of Bologna. Her research and curatorial work focus on interdisciplinary artistic practices that engage with present and future realities, highlighting and shaping dominant as well as alternative socio-political, spiritual, or scientific narratives.

Until recently, she worked as Associate Curator at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, where since 2023 her work had centred on the exhibition “For Children. Art Stories since 1968”, as well as its accompanying catalogue and symposium. The project explored how artists and institutions worldwide began engaging younger audiences from the late 1960s onwards, establishing new forms of intergenerational and collaborative artistic practice.
From 2020 to 2021, Korndoerfer served as Artistic Director of Kunstverein Arnsberg and, in collaboration with the City of Arnsberg, curated a series of exhibitions, performances, and public art projects. Since 2013, she has worked as an independent curator, organising exhibitions including “Proyecto Eclipse” at Matucana 100 in Santiago de Chile and “Hey, Mars!” at Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin, both examining the implications of humanity’s dream of exploring outer space. Earlier in her career, she worked at institutions such as the Gropius Bau in Berlin and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Korndoerfer has contributed as an author and editor to several exhibition catalogues and monographs and has taught at art academies such as the Berlin University of the Arts, the Braunschweig University of Art, and Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle.

Jorge Menna

Jorge Menna Barreto is an artist and researcher whose practice engages site-specificity through long-term exchanges between body, environment, and territory, allowing sites to determine what he builds—and, more recently, what he eats. Moving across agroforestry, land art, and multispecies assemblages, his work unfolds through porous relations in which digestion becomes a sculptural act and metabolism a form of land regeneration. Throughout his career, he has investigated different forms of audience engagement, developing the concept of “cellular participation” to describe metabolic exchanges between bodies, food, and environment. His recent project Dehydrated Landguages investigates the intersections between climate, aridity, and language through the relational landscapes of California and the Brazilian sertão. He teaches in the Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and cultivates an ongoing land regeneration project in São Paulo, Brazil.

Greer Valley

Dr. Greer Valley is a South African curator, scholar, and researcher with experience across the visual arts, higher education, heritage, and the built environment. Her research examines anti-colonial modes of representation in cultural institutions and the ways museums might enact forms of repair.

She is Senior Curator and Head of Curatorial Affairs at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, where she leads curatorial, exhibition management, and collections teams and co-convenes the UWC–Zeitz MOCAA Museum Fellowship Programme. She is also a Research Fellow in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of the Western Cape, Deputy Chairperson of the Africa South Arts Initiative, and a board member of the District Six Museum.

She holds a PhD in Art Historical Studies, a Master's in Visual Art, and a Bachelor's degree in Architecture.

Changing Audience Expectations

Changing Audience Expectations. Developing a New Eloquence: Participation, Interactivity, and Immediacy

Guest Panelists:

Rapid Response Webinars are free of cost for CIMAM members.

Biographies:

Recommended readings:

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