The program of journalists' visit to the repair and renovation of the Museum of Contemporary Art's treasures in Tehran was held on Tuesday, August 12, with the presence of Hadi Mozaffari, Director General of the Visual Arts Center, Ehsan Aghaei, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art and Majid Habibinejad restoration Project Control Manager of Museum of Contemporary Art.
At the beginning of the program, Hadi Mozaffari, referred to the increase of the time for improvement of the Museum of Contemporary Art and, said: We hope that the renovation of the museum will be completed by the end of September. Work that began in May 2018. Because of the importance, the work took a longer time than originally anticipated duration. While rebuilding the treasury space to relocate artworks, we could have speeded up the work, but the quality of preservation of the works could be reduced. Under these circumstances, the reconstruction of the treasury could be completed within a few weeks but we preferred to increase the time in favor of better protection of the treasures.
Renovation work on the museum began on 12 fronts and in two phases. Our major challenge part of rebuilding the museum was related to the treasures that this happened and moving the artworks to their places will be done soon. During the Corona period, when most of the country's cultural activities became semi-closed, the museum was the last place to be closed on March 19th, and work began on April 6th.
After that, Engineer Habibinejad gave an explanation about the actions taken in the museum, treasury site, and said: In the dialogue of museum improvement, we faced two issues; at first Parts of the structure were opened to see what damages below the skin are. The second issue was the treasury store space itself, which was worn out and damp. The most important issue was the mechanical and electronic facilities of the treasury, and it was necessary to consider special facilities for this part. With this approach, we started working in 9 main spaces of the treasury.
There are currently three sections dedicated to storeroom: Treasure No. 1 is for the main works, Treasure No. 2 is for paper works, and Treasure No. 3 is for the sculptures. Next to them, we added a section called the restoration room to this space. The most important dialogue in the main treasure was the issue of increasing its capacity so that in addition to better preservation of current works, predicted for additional works in the future.
in this regard, Mozaffari also said: In the restoration of cultural and historical buildings, the important point is not to add anything to space, and the person who enters the place after improvement should not notice any difference from the past. But in the videos that will be released soon from the restoration process of the museum, all these changes will be shown for the audience.
Habibinejad then talked about the changes that have been made to the security and heating system of the museum.