Abstract
This paper examines the 2015 exhibition This Is My Heritage—which opened at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane (Meeanjin in the Yugara/Turrbal languages), and later toured to a number of Queensland museums—as an example of one possible strategy for de-colonialising not just museum spaces, but their archives and the objects within. This Is My Heritage in its final form invited twelve Queensland Indigenous artists, not into the gallery as makers — as is more often the case in Australian exhibitions foregrounding Indigenous culture, though they are still underrepresented in galleries — but into the archive as investigators. The participants were given access to the Queensland Museum’s collected Indigenous materials, and asked to find one that “spoke” to them across time, in collaboration with the Museum’s curatorial staff. In doing so, I suggest, This Is My Heritage presents a redefinition of “audience” for the museum as a shifting set of audiences, and suggests one possible means of reinventing the idea of access through affect. Affect is “prepersonal,” physical, and spatial; it is intertwined with emotion and meaning, but not to be conflated with them. Using affective strategies to mediate between individuals and objects provides an alternate mode of storytelling to the conventional, discursive, dialectic approach historically favoured by galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM). This Is My Heritage approached this through the experience of the individual—not an abstract, hypothetical individual as a member of the visiting public, but specific individuals, with specific, entangled relationships to the archive.
Presenters
Seth EllisSenior Lecturer in Interactive Media, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2021 Special Focus - Voices from the Edge: Negotiating the Local in the Global
KEYWORDS
Affect, Representation, Indigenous, Participatory Design, Curation, Access, Archives, Collections
