The Advisory Council of International Council of Museums (ICOM) elected Dubai as the host city of the 27th General Conference, which will take place in 2025.
Every three years, the international museum community comes together for the biggest conference of our sector: the triennial ICOM General Conference. Since its first edition in 1948, ICOM’s General Conference has become a worldwide reputed hub for exchange about the topical issues museums tackle today and the most innovative solutions.
During the 2021 Annual Meetings in June, three candidates were announced: Kazan, proposed by ICOM Russia; Stockholm, proposed by ICOM Sweden; and Dubai, proposed by ICOM UAE. The 90th Advisory Council of ICOM, which took place on the 18 – 19 November, elected Dubai to host the 27th General Conference. ICOM UAE presented the bid to host the conference around the theme The Future of Museums in Rapidly Changing Communities, focusing on change, recovery, accessibility, and transparency.
ICOM DUBAI 2025 THEME STATEMENT
The world we live in today is vastly different from the one we used to know not so long ago. A torrent of events — a pandemic, massive protests, natural disasters, soaring inequalities, a technology and digital revolution, to name a few — has changed everything we thought we knew and led to the one thing we can be certain of: tomorrow will be uncertain. We are all trying to learn to cope, adapt, change, progress within a fast-changing environment, with some communities and people better equipped than others to face the changes.
Our museums have been going through the same process, albeit not always at the same pace. As we seek to transform ourselves and relate to others, so do our museums. And that is the explorative journey we are proposing at the Conference: where might we go next, together – museums and communities, hand in hand, for a better future? We, as museum professionals and members of our communities need to recognise them and find ways to use them to our advantage and to the greater good, reinforcing our role as a social actor – activist, and an agent for changes.
In September 2021, Peter Keller visited Dubai to evaluate the project.
ICOM PRAGUE 2022
Prague, Czech Republic will welcome the 26th ICOM General Conference on “The Future of Museums” in the week of 20–28 August 2022. Museum professionals from around the world will put forward the topics and set the direction of the museum sector for the next three years at least.
