Page 38 - Post Summit_2019_AV

34 to go to between five and eight organisations,” she said. “You have to know what to ask and how to interpret archival material, so we are digitising this material using new semantic technology, to make sense of 11 million digital objects.” Not only does the project aim to make sense of the material and present it in new ways to a wider audience, it allows families to reconstruct the lives of their relatives. “You can only do this if people are willing to open up their collections and to share what they have,” said Ms Jongma. Trained as an artist but having curated for three decades, Dr Apinan Poshyananda is the permanent secretary for the Ministry of Culture in Thailand as well as artistic director of the Bangkok Art Biennale, which now covers 20 venues in the Thai capital. “We live in a brave new world and I think we are all digital addicts, so when we talk about digital arts in a museum context, there are the haves and the have-nots and not all museums are rich,” said Dr Poshyananda. It is his belief that art needs to move beyond the museum context, and this was reflected in his use of traditional temples as art venues during the Biennale. “When people visited they experienced the chanting, the prayers, as well as the artworks, and we got to a situation where the chanting and the prayer became a form of communication. In this way, digital and temple art mixed, strangely and in a way that was very challenging.” Returning to the idea of haves and have-nots, Mr Ogboh suggested that while virtual reality allows a divide to be bridged between geographical areas with and without arts infrastructure, it also offers a temporary solution to a far more vexed question: the repatriation of artworks looted from Africa during the colonial period. The conversation led to one of the key proposals to emerge from the discussion stage of Culture Summit.