Opening academic year Faculty of Arts 2025: Arts Lecture by Bastiaan Steffens
Traditionally, the Faculty of Arts opens the academic year with the 'Arts Lecture'. This year's 38th edition will take place on Tuesday, 2 September, at 4 p.m. in the Aula of the Academy Building. The lecture will be delivered by Bastiaan Steffens, Head of Exhibitions and Collection at Museum aan de A, and is titled ‘The Imagination of the Museum’.
Date: Tuesday, 2 September
Time: 4 P.M. to approx. 5 P.M. (walk-in from 3.45 P.M.)
Location: Aula Academy Building, Broerstraat 5 (if the Aula is full, there is a possibility to follow the opening via livestream in the Senate Chamber)
This year's Arts Lecture will be delivered in Dutch and admission is free. Afterwards there will be drinks in the Spiegelzaal (Academy Building).
The Imagination of the Museum
Groningen is getting a new museum. Museum aan de A will be the history museum for the city and province, telling stories from prehistory to the present day. These are stories from, by, and about Groningen.
For now, this museum mainly consists of architectural drawings and policy documents, but how do you actually create a museum? Exhibition maker Bastiaan Steffens will take the audience on a journey through the choices and dilemmas involved in the creation of the new Museum aan de A during his lecture. Using this process as a framework, he will place museum practices within the broader debate on how museums today engage with history.
Museums must balance a range of expectations: they need to be attractive and experience-driven, appeal to a broad audience, and also provide space for a society that increasingly wants to participate and co-create from the outset. How do you accommodate all these interests in the creative process? What is the role of humanities knowledge in a museum that is more and more shaped through shared authorship? And what place is there for imagination or fantasy amidst all these different interests and expectations?
Bastiaan Steffens (1988) is Head of Exhibitions and Collections at Museum aan de A in Groningen. He studied Archaeology at Leiden University and worked for six years as Curator of Archaeology at the Drents Museum, where he was responsible for creating major exhibitions, such as Pompeii and The Nebra Sky Disk. As an exhibition maker, he is involved in a wide range of projects at the intersection of history, heritage, and the public. Additionally, he is a board member at UNESCO Global Geopark Hondsrug.
More information
For more information, please contact the Department of Communication & Marketing, Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen. Email: info.let rug.nl