Description
Recent scholarship in the field of International Relations attends to the role that Museums play in fostering knowledge production while at the same time being sites and sources of knowledge themselves. This article attends to this emerging set of literature through an interrogation of a museum installation at Tate, Liverpool entitled Refugee Journeys Through the Balkan Route: A Crisis No More? It rehearses the choreography of the installation and draws the audience’s attention to the creation of a quilt as a space in which to express solidarity, incite reflexivity, and wonder at how such engagements can support the transformation of gaze. Gazing is reflexively explored through the patchwork squares that were produced, and archived, throughout the installation. In so doing the article argues on behalf of imagination, emotional articulations, and storytelling on the part of both the academics responsible for the installation and those who participated in its experience suggesting that such experience have a transformative potential. This repository of unexplored knowledge foregrounds an argument suggesting that gallery installations are simultaneously sites of knowledge production as well as a site of critical reflexivity and have much to offer the discipline of IR, broadly construed.
