Artist Seher Shah and museum director Glenn D. Lowry bring their discrete observations on what constitutes the “contemporary” and what influences and plagues their respective practices.
For Seher Shah, the practice of the contemporary is a language, at once distant and familiar; it has to do with place consciousness, fragments of things and in-between spaces. For Glenn D. Lowry, the role of a museum should be to look at how the present impacts our understanding of the past as opposed to how the past impacts our understanding of the present. Despite this global contagion, both Seher and Glenn believe that it presents an “opportunity” for everyone to confront the challenges of our times and do better.