Imagined Museums : Art and Modernity in Postcolonial Morocco / Author: Katarzyna Pieprzak

CONTENTS: Monumental Sites of Discourse: : National Museums, Corporate Collections, and Cabinets of Curiosity Degeneration and Decay in the National Museum: Useful and Useless Memory in Modern Morocco --Marketplace Museums: Art and Citizenship in Corporate Morocco --A Private Cabinet of Curiosity: The Belghazi Museum and Its Politics of Nostalgia --Tactical Architectures of Art: : Discursive, Ephemeral, and Nomadic Museums --Imaginary Museums and Their Real Phantoms: Exorcising Monumental Discourse --Taking Art to the Streets: The Ephemeral Outdoor Museum as Contact Zone --Rethinking the Museum in Morocco

Imagined Museums examines the intertwined politics surrounding art and modernization in Morocco from 1912 to the present by considering the structure of the museum not only as a modern institution but also as a national monument to modernity, asking what happens when museum monuments start to crumble. In an analysis of museum history, exhibition policy, the lack of national museum space for modern art, and postmodern exhibit spaces in Morocco, Katarzyna Pieprzak focuses on the role that art plays in the social fabric of a modernizing Morocco. She argues that the decay of colonial and national institutions of culture has invited the rethinking of the museum and generated countermuseums to stage new narratives of art, memory, and modernity.

English