Museum Futures
The essay explores the future of museums in India, focusing on how they can move beyond serving as repositories of objects and towards becoming spaces that enable meaningful dialogues and challenge dominant narratives. It argues that the museum of the future needs to critically engage with issues of decolonization, social inequality, and the politics of representation.
The author begins by tracing the colonial origins of museums in India, established by the British as part of their knowledge-gathering project. These museums were often designed to showcase the material wealth and cultural achievements of the colonies, reinforcing narratives of European superiority. Post-independence, the Indian state sought to use museums to promote nationalist narratives and a unified national identity. However, this approach failed to adequately address the complex, pluralistic nature of Indian culture and history.
The essay then delves into two key conceptual frames that it proposes as critical for envisioning the museum of the future - aesthetic equality (AE) and discursive equality (DE). AE, drawing on the ideas of thinkers like Jacques Rancière and Boris Groys, refers to the recognition of the fundamental equality of all artistic forms and media. This can serve as a metaphor for challenging social and political inequalities embedded in the museum. DE, on the other hand, speaks to the need to address the unequal relationship between different knowledge systems - the colonizer and the colonized, the global north and global south.
The author uses the example of two exhibitions - "India and the World" (2019) and "Arna Jharna: The Thar Desert Museum" (2003) - to illustrate these concepts. "India and the World" was a collaborative exhibition between the British Museum and Indian museums, aiming to reframe India's role in global history. However, the author argues that it struggled to achieve true discursive equality, as the objects were still mediated through the lens of Eurocentric frameworks. In contrast, the "Arna Jharna" museum, dedicated to brooms, was conceived as a space to foreground the narratives of marginalized communities and challenge dominant aesthetic hierarchies.
The essay also engages with the evolution of the terms 'desi' and 'margi' in modern Indian art criticism, tracing how they were appropriated by figures like A.K. Coomaraswamy to construct a romanticized vision of organic, hierarchical cultural unity. The author suggests that a critical interrogation of these concepts, informed by Raymond Williams' idea of "community of the modern future," can help museums move beyond essentialist notions of identity and culture.
Ultimately, the essay argues that the museum of the future must be willing to host uncomfortable dialogues, give voice to marginalized narratives, and challenge the very premises upon which it has traditionally operated. This requires a shift from the museum as a temple of elitist culture to a forum for critical, emancipatory engagement. The author envisions a museum that can serve as a site for the production of new, inclusive forms of historical and cultural evidence, moving beyond the dominant, Eurocentric modes of knowledge production.
Here is a 1000 word summary of the key points:
The future of museums is a topic of much discussion, as these institutions must continually reinvent themselves to remain relevant and meaningful. Museums have undergone significant transformations over their 250-year history, evolving from private collections and research archives to more publicly accessible and engaging spaces.
As museums face the challenges of globalization, decolonization, and increasing diversity, the need for constant self-reflection and adaptation has become even more critical. The traditional roles of museums - collecting, conserving, researching, exhibiting, and mediating art and culture - are being expanded to prioritize more participatory, inclusive, and open-ended approaches.
The ICOM (International Council of Museums) is currently discussing potential revisions to the definition of a museum, to better reflect these changing expectations and responsibilities. Suggestions include characterizing museums as "democratizing, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures." They should acknowledge conflicts and challenges of the present, safeguard diverse memories, guarantee equal access to heritage, and work in active partnership with communities.
This shift calls for museums to be more porous, adaptive, and responsive to the needs and perspectives of their audiences. Two case studies illustrate this:
The Acervo da Laje in Salvador, Brazil is an unconventional "museum" located in houses and on rooftops (lajes) in a peripheral urban community. It was founded to democratize access to cultural memory and artistic expression, serving as a space for encounter, revelation and balanced dialogue. The Acervo sees the home and the laje as potential museum spaces, where the materiality of art and memory can be uncovered and shared. Its flexible, participatory approach contrasts with the elitism often associated with traditional museums.
Similarly, the Museo de Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia has evolved from a typical colonial-era institution to one more deeply engaged with its local context and communities. Through initiatives like the "POLIS: Towards the Political Reconstruction of the City" exhibition, the museum has worked to dismantle dichotomies between the "planned, legal city" and the "spontaneous, chaotic and illegal city." It has embraced more interdisciplinary and relational approaches, serving as a platform for marginalized voices and collective efforts to reimagine urban space.
These examples highlight how museums can move beyond their historic roles as sites of collection, preservation and top-down knowledge dissemination. They suggest the potential for museums to become places of critical dialogue, diverse representation, and collaborative knowledge production - spaces that are "democratizing, inclusive and polyphonic."
To realize this vision, museums must grapple with ethical questions around authorship, authority and the dynamics of inclusion/exclusion. They must find ways to respectfully engage with communities, share curatorial agency, and create accessible, welcoming environments. This requires rethinking not just exhibition content and formats, but the very structures, staffing and underlying assumptions of the museum.
The future museum will likely be more porous, networked and responsive, shedding its ivory tower associations. It may take on more ephemeral, distributed or site-specific forms, venturing beyond traditional buildings. Digital technologies offer new possibilities for democratizing access, generating dialogue, and connecting dispersed collections and communities.
Overall, the museum of the future must be prepared to continually evolve, to critically examine its own role and biases, and to work in service of broader social and cultural transformation. It is a tall order, but one that many forward-thinking institutions are already striving to fulfill, with creativity, humility and a spirit of openness to "l'avenir" - the ever-unfolding future.
Here is a 1000 word summary of the research paper:
The paper explores the evolution of museums from the 19th century to modern times, with a focus on the ideological consequences of separating ethnography from cultural history and the impact of colonialism. It discusses the efforts and challenges in decolonizing museums, highlighting the need for museums in Africa to be inclusive, participatory, and reflective of the dynamic nature of culture.
The paper begins by discussing how the association of art museums with high culture has alienated potential visitors, particularly in post-colonial contexts. Museums in Africa are faced with the challenge of breaking free from their troubled pasts and engaging in meaningful dialogue with their constituents, while continuing to preserve and display the artworks in their collections, many of which are remnants of colonial legacies.
The author introduces an interactive art project called the The Portable Hawkers Museum as a way to critically reflect on the role of museums in Africa. The Portable Hawkers Museum is a portable museum without walls that questions what is valued in other museums and how those values are communicated through their forms of collecting and display. By exhibiting inexpensive, mass-produced items from street vendors in Johannesburg, the project draws attention to the ways in which museums remove objects from their original contexts and ascribe new cultural value to them.
The author argues that by mediating between the museum, their collections and their constituents, artists can challenge inherited museum practices and call into question the hegemony of the institutions of art. The Portable Hawkers Museum, for example, parodies certain cultural history museum practices while also imitating some of the customs that street vendors enact as they unpack and pack up their stalls every day. The author occupies multiple roles in this project, including museum director, volunteer docent, curator and artist, thereby calling into question the ideological separation of these activities.
The paper acknowledges the paradox that despite the intention to challenge the hegemony of museums, the avant-garde artists who have employed similar strategies have ultimately failed to overthrow those institutions. The author addresses this paradox through employing parody, which enables her to explore the contradictions within the project. For example, the production of a limited edition set of postcards that are signed, numbered and stamped with the museum stamp, blurs the boundaries between original and reproduction, and foregrounds the fetishization of the artist's signature.
The author also discusses an installation titled Authentic Reproductions, where she created plaster reproductions of objects from the Portable Hawkers Museum collection and displayed them alongside the plaster reproductions in the Skulpturhalle Basel. This work challenges notions of value, as the objects that are reproduced are not considered valuable within the discourse of art history, yet within the context of the installation, they become 'original works of art'.
The paper highlights the importance of engaging with audience responses to the Portable Hawkers Museum project. The author recounts how when the museum was opened in public spaces, passersby often mistook it for a street vendor's stall, and she used these interactions to question the power that museums have to transform common objects into objects of cultural and aesthetic value. However, the author also acknowledges that despite the potential of such engagement to enable dialogue and critique, the very idea of a museum remains imported, and even the Portable Hawkers Museum is not universally accessible.
The paper concludes by proposing that to address the problems of the colonial legacies and alienation of museums in Africa, the concept of the museum must be written 'under erasure'. Drawing on Derrida's concept of 'sous rature', the author suggests that the word 'museum' should be crossed out, acknowledging that it is an inadequate term to capture the problematic nature of these institutions, while also recognizing that there is not yet a more suitable terminology. This, the author argues, is better than simply substituting one terminology for another, as this can produce the illusion that the issues have been resolved, when in fact they have been potentially forgotten.
The author contends that through critical praxis, artists can help open the discursive spaces of art production and display, and create awareness of the ideological nature of the institutions of art. In the process, artists can hold museums up for a particular way of looking, and in so doing work towards new museum futures in Africa.
