How can queer perspectives transform the ways we engage with art, museums, and one another? And what might it mean to queer a museum?

About

In this three-hour workshop, we will explore queer art education and mediation as a critical and transformative practice. We will consider how museums, galleries, and other cultural institutions can move beyond passive forms of art viewing and become more interactive, inclusive, and critical spaces for learning, dialogue, and participation. Starting from the idea that meaningful educational work requires a nuanced understanding of its audiences and the diverse communities surrounding cultural institutions, the workshop will ask how art mediation can respond to different experiences, identities, and forms of knowledge. Together, we will examine how queering art mediation can challenge institutional power structures and open up alternative ways of relating to art, cultural knowledge, and each other.

What you will learn

The workshop combines theoretical reflection with hands-on, collaborative exercises. We will explore how queer perspectives can reshape established approaches to art education, outreach, and participation, and ask how LGBTQIA+ histories, identities, bodies, and perspectives can actively influence the ways art is interpreted, discussed, and shared.

Through a range of accessible, low-preparation methods, participants will experiment with playful and collaborative approaches to art mediation, including:

• shared drawing as a collective process of looking and responding
• bilateral mirror drawing as an exercise in perception, cooperation, and embodied interaction
• sculpting your own queer fantasy body as a way of exploring identity, embodiment, imagination, and alternative forms of representation

The workshop creates space to reflect on questions such as: Who gets to participate in museums, and under what conditions? Whose knowledge and experiences are represented? How can art mediation challenge rather than reproduce institutional hierarchies? And how might queer approaches help us imagine more inclusive and participatory cultural spaces? In the second part of the workshop, Max Lübke, curator of art mediation and education, will lead a guided tour at Moderna Museet Malmö. Focusing on Turbeville’s photographic works and photomontages, the tour will explore questions of gender, female bodies, femininity, and homoerotic fantasies between women. The approximately 60-minute tour will provide an opportunity to connect the workshop’s theoretical and practical approaches with a concrete engagement with artworks in the museum.

Participating

The workshop is aimed at:

• art educators and museum educators / mediators
• artists and cultural practitioners
• students in art education, museum studies, and related fields
• curators and professionals working in cultural institutions
• anyone interested in critical, queer, and socially engaged museum practice

No previous experience with queer theory or art education is required. The workshop is designed as a space for experimentation, exchange, and collective learning.

Practical information

• Language: English
• All materials will be provided. You do not need to bring anything with you. You are welcome to bring a laptop or notebook if you would like to take notes, but this is entirely optional.
• Entrance tickets to Moderna Museet are purchased on site by each participant before the workshop starts.

Facilitator

Max Lübke (he/they) is a Berlin-based curator working across museum education, outreach, and critical cultural practice. Their work explores how museums can become more inclusive, participatory, and socially engaged spaces by critically examining structures of power and discrimination. They designed the first-ever public LGBTQIA+ tour for the 21st-century collection at Hamburger Bahnhof – National Gallery for Contemporary Art and developed the school workshop Mapping Queer Worlds. With experience in art mediation, curatorial projects, literary studies, and community-oriented cultural work, they are particularly interested in queer and class-critical perspectives, collaborative learning, and new forms of institutional engagement.

Context

The workshop is hosted in partnership with Malmö Residency where Max is one of the residents this year, together with [Moderna Museet] (8https://www.modernamuseet.se/sv/malmo/). Malmö Residency 2026 is organised as a collaboration between more than 60 companies in Malmö, the City of Malmö, the Swedish Institute, and Media Evolution. The initiative is funded by the City of Malmö, Malmö University, and Malmö Generate District.