History Reconsidered
Look Again! : Recontextualization in the Exhibition "Blind Spots. Images of the Danish West Indies Colony"
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sarah Giersing
“Amnesia,” “ignorance,” and “selective remembrance” have been often-used terms when discussing national memory discourses on Denmark’s colonial history in the Global South and involvement in the transatlantic enslavement trade. To investigate this, a large exhibition about the former Danish West Indies, now the US Virgin Islands, was organized in the Royal Danish Library in 2017. This exhibition presented diverse visual artefacts such as maps, paintings, book illustrations, and photographs all found in Danish collections today. The historical power structures endure in the material frameworks of the national collections, and the images of the former Danish colony were all created by Europeans and thus represent the view of the colonizers only. The curators faced the challenge of drawing the visitors’ attention to how the colonial images-on-display work through specific visual tropes and stereotypes, and to what aspects of history they have left out. Three strategies were employed to include contesting perspectives: A collaborative sound intervention designed to bring out emotional responses, a web-based tool to remix historical photographs, and contemporary artworks by Danish and Cruzian artists engaged in critique of colonial representation. This paper explores how these three strategies could recontextualize the colonial images in the exhibition.
Destabilizing the Master Narrative of ANZAC: A Painterly Investigation of Memory and Memorializing at the Australian War Memorial
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Nay
The focus museum for this paper is the Australian War Memorial (AWM) located in Canberra, Australia's national capital. The museum wing is currently featuring a centenary exhibition commemorating Australia's involvement in the Great War (GW) of 1914-1918. In the 100 years since the GW, a dominant narrative of post-colonial Australian heritage has developed concerning archetypal Australian traits. What is referred to as the "ANZAC Myth," has been constructed and perpetuated around particular characteristics of Australia's fighting forces (AIF) from that war. These include resourcefulness, durability, larrikinism, and "mateship" as defined by the instigator of this myth, Charles Bean. He is single-handedly responsible for the official War History of the AIF and the collection of GW material for the museum. He was the visionary of the memorial and considered by many as having a spiritual custodianship of the site to this day. In my paper I discuss the implication of a perceived colonial inferiority in the construction of the myth/legend heritage. I introduce a counter narrative that includes ex-centric figures for a changing conception of this heritage and I address how my practice as a visual artist within a PhD investigation is contributing to a parallel museum.
(Re)visiting the Past: Subjectivities, Encounters, and Engagements at the Aljube Museum
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Joana Miguel Almeida
This paper is part of an ongoing doctoral research taking place in the Programme of Anthropology: Politics and Displays of Culture and Museology in Portugal. My current research reflects on the processes of musealization, appropriation and re-qualification of a set of symbolic sites of the former portuguese dictatorship (1926-1974). For this specific paper, I intend to reflect on the fieldwork done at the Aljube Museum – Resistance and Freedom opened in Lisbon in the year of 2015, a musealized former political prison which reflects on the portuguese dictatorship and its resistance. During fieldwork, I attended more than two dozens of guided visits and interviewed, afterwards, a group of different visitors (as well as, at a different time, a group of former political prisoners of that same site and members of civic associations of preservation of memory). Therefore, this discussion reflects on the engagement, emotions, discourses, and subjective perceptions related to the visit of this site and to the heritage-making processes – or their absences – of this recent past.
