Description
Colonial imaginaries have structured world politics for the past 500 years. Ethnographic museums, as the “self-appointed keepers of other people’s material” culture, and as the “self-appointed interpreters of others’ histories,” have participated in constructing these colonial imaginaries by producing particular orders of gender, race and class, and have materially participated in colonial forms of domination through their collecting practices (Ames 1992, 140; Bennett 1995, 2004). Postcolonial and critical museology literatures have contributed to reflections, including within ethnographic museums themselves, surrounding the need to address the colonial legacies of such institutions. These reflections have led numerous museums to attempt to “decolonize.” This paper focuses on one such attempt: a temporary exhibition on the “Aboriginal arts of Australia” that explicitly aimed to address the colonial histories of Australia and the colonial histories of the museum’s own Australian collections. Part of the curator’s strategy was to invite an Aboriginal-mixed-ancestry artist, Brook Andrew, to intervene in the exhibition. The results of this collaboration illuminates some of the ways in which art and museums can participate in resistances against dominant racist and colonial imaginaries. While the scenography of the exhibition succeeded in denouncing colonial violences of Australia’s past, it failed to hold the museum visitor accountable for the contemporary legacies of this colonial history. Brook Andrew’s artistic intervention, on the other hand, by superimposing multiple temporalities of colonial history, including the present, succeeded in pointing to the viewer’s contemporary responsibilities regarding the legacies of colonial relations.
Ames, Michael M. Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums. UBC Press, 1992.
Bennett, Tony. Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism. London: Routledge, 2004.
Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. Routledge. London, 1995.
