Review Special shows

Venue: Hall 2.2, A021

For the past 20 years The Best in Heritage has been dedicated to delivering an annual, global overview of best practices in museums, heritage and conservation, focusing on the criteria of professional excellence, public value, and innovation. The goal is to offer insights into the most prominent award-winning achievements and share these further, with both the professional and civil-society communities concerned with heritage.

Its main partner is ICOM, with its leading, global role in the professional sector, and through a long-standing partnership with Europa Nostra, the European Voice of Civil Society committed to Cultural Heritage, the conference carries on as a unique, synthesising platform.

Although usually taking place in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in 2021 the conference took form only as an online video-series of interviews www.thebestinheritage.com/conference, with a wide range of representatives of museum, heritage and conservation projects that were awarded in 2020.

From 2007 The Best in Heritage has been featured regularly at EXPONATEC COLOGNE fair, where it brings a selection of *crème-de-la-crème* of awarded achievements from the wider field of cultural heritage.

Venue: Hall 2.2, E020

With this year's theme of „Werte verstehen – understanding values“, the CICS dedicates itself to a central aspect of restoration: the creation and preservation of values.

Restorers secure the material substance of art and cultural assets with their work. In the process, they take historical, artistic, aesthetic and functional values, as well as questions of authenticity into account. These values are not seldom concealed and first become experienceable through research and restoration. Restorers in this way preserve cultural treasures from decay, loss and irretrievable oblivion. Their intensive work carried out directly on the object and the accompanying interdisciplinary research activities often lead to a reevaluation of the art and cultural assets and contribute to long-term conservation, as well as to sustainable dealings with cultural values. Restoration thus not only points back into the past, but also into the future in a modern way.

At the Cologne Institute of Conservation Sciences (CICS) of the Cologne University of Applied Sciences, the technology and conservation of art and cultural assets from Antiquity to the present are taught and researched in five fields of study. Students and the teaching staff will present select projects and research findings at EXPONATEC COLOGNE 2021.

During the art consultation on Wednesday, 17 November 2021, the scientists of the institute will this year once again examine private objects like paintings or antiques.