Trinkhall Museum

The Trinkhall Museum

At the forefront of Liège's cultural landscape, the Trinkhall intends to develop numerous collaborations with the various players in artistic, social and cultural life, in Liège and far beyond the city's borders. The opening of the Trinkhall is the culmination of a project that took more than ten years to come to fruition. It emanates from Créahm, which for forty years has been defending the artistic expression of people with mental disabilities from a perspective that remains profoundly innovative and committed. The Trinkhall benefits from the support of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation and from the support of the City of Liège and its alderman's office for culture. As such, it is the expression of an urban policy that sees art as an instrument of emancipation inspired by the desire and demand for a better life.

The New Building

Designed by the Beguin-Massart architectural office, the building, covered with an opaline mesh with gently rounded contours, stands like a lantern in the heart of the city. It is the culmination of a reflection in which the architects were able to meet the poetics of the place, its history, its beauty, and all the functional requirements of a museum of today. With more than 600 m2 of exhibition space, a bookshop, a documentation centre, a meeting place and educational activities, the museum is the perfect place to discover the history of the city. and all the technical premises necessary for the conservation of the works, the Trinkhall is part of a new dynamic.

Its café-restaurant, with its terrace overlooking Avroy Park, remains freely accessible to the public and reinforces the dimension of exchange and sociability that has characterised the place since the 19th century.

A New Museum Policy

As in the past, the museum is developing and showcasing its very rich collection: nearly three thousand works from all over the world, mainly by artists with mental disabilities. But now, with a profoundly renewed museum project based on the notion of situated arts. The notion of situated arts gives the museum its new identity. It manifests the singularity of the Trinkhall in the contemporary arts landscape and commissioned the development of its program of exhibitions, research and mediation. It encompasses, but is not limited to, the regimes of expression linked to mental disability and the experiences associated with them, particularly in the context of the creative workshops that have developed around the world over the last forty years.

As such, the museum's links with the Créahm workshops remain very close. However, the fields that the Trinkhall collection and the historical experience of the workshops allow us to envisage go far beyond the mere register of mental disability. They touch on the very question of artistic creation and its relationship with society, the world and each one of us.

The Trinkhall is a museum of contemporary arts whose policy is based on the experience of the workshops.

The Situated Arts

The notion of situated arts defines Trinkhall's museum policy. It takes into account the work of art in the globality of its processual existence, the whole of the relations that the work of art maintains with its environments, as much from the point of view of the conditions of its realisation as from the point of view of the conditions - social, aesthetic and cultural - of its reception. Since the birth and affirmation of the avant-gardes at the beginning of the 20th century, the "arts of the outside" - the arts of the mad, primitive arts, art brut, outsider arts, for example - have not ceased to impose the evidence of their situation, singular and irreducible to the processes of artification that give them legitimacy and visibility in the "art world". Through the frontier effects that they constantly set in motion, the arts of the outside world constitute an ideal field of investigation for identifying and understanding the inclusion of all forms of artistic expression in this complex dynamic of the situation.

The Trinkhall's collection, consisting mainly of works of art made by artists mentally handicapped in a workshop context, offers a very rich example of a situation both in because of the collective arrangements that are linked to creation in the workshop, that because of the provisions of mentally handicapped artists. The notion of situated arts is given therefore as the right instrument to think about the relationship between art and mental disability and to conceive the Trinkhall museum policy, avoiding any form of reduction or stigmatisation that taints too often, the invention and reception of "outdoor arts".