Abstract

Artistic museum intervention has become an established practice since late 1980s and has been used by museums as a curatorial and interpretive tool ever since. Exhibitions such as “Uncomfortable Truths: The Shadow of Slave Trading on Contemporary Art” held at the V&A in London (February-June 2007), and “Queering the Museum” at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (November 2010-February 2011) are recent testimonies of museums’ welcome approach towards invited artists’ interventions. Author Miwon Kwon has described commissioning institutional interventions negatively as the museum’s self-promotional tool and the resulting status of the artist as commodity. Prior to this, in his 1997 essay ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’ Hal Foster described the artist’s subjective engagement with institutions and communities as “ethnographic self-fashioning”. Whilst museums are engaging with its multi-cultural audience through events and activities, the potential of the artistic sub-altern voice in bringing both personal and global associations to the collections offers a non- monologic interpretive approach. Moreover, it allows for a generating of contemporary meanings of objects and their relationship with the diasporic cultures they formed part of. I will re-visit my own work, an exhibition of a series of interactive artworks that examined the non-tangible meanings of Hindu deities in the Croydon Clocktower Museum in 2008 in order to re-evaluate the role of the contemporary artist in museum intervention art practice. This article makes a case for a more democratic process of intervening the museum, one that opens it up as a valuable and accessible site for fresh epistemological engagements by the artist with collections and their meanings.