Representations and Reflections
The Earl Project: Mending as Metaphor for Veterans, Soldiers, Survivors
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Geraldine Craig
The Earl Project is a community-based project with veterans, soldiers, family members, and survivors that promotes wellness and creativity through burn-out art workshops, using fire, collage, photocopy, and bleach color burn-out on fabric to tell their story, usually in non-objective, abstract ways. Participants take home individual works and contribute to a community war stories cloth scroll inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry. Using burn-out techniques with mending stitches as both metaphor and realization of healing in a physical manifestation, they transform lived experience into art. The project is scheduled for two exhibitions to date (2019, 2020) of the community scroll and individual works, offering a site-specific and digital museum experience of the workshops. One goal of the project is to complicate the common representations of military experience, to render the personal as part of the larger human story seen from multiple viewpoints, and to serve as non-partisan document of twenty-first life that extends beyond the polarization of divisive religious and political ideologies. The Earl Project uses current technologies in production (digital printing on cloth) and on-line digital dissemination as it retains an ancient technology - stitched cloth. With ongoing photographic documentation and expansion of the marginalized communities working on the scroll, sections will be digitally stitched together on-line and presented on The Earl Project website and on multiple websites of participating museums and workshop institutional venues for a global audience. The community-owned scroll will eventually find a museum home, offering new conversations regarding intellectual property in social-practice art projects.
Aysén Museums Network: New Relationships, New Meanings between Community Museums of Chilean Patagonia
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anamaria Rojas-Munera, Kemel Sade
What do partnerships between museums in rural areas teach to those located in other regions? This study draws on Red de Museos Aysén (Aysén Museums Network), a collaboration platform from Aysén Region, a wide territory in Southern Chile (Patagonia) well-known for its extreme geography, yet unexplored routes and isolation. Our experience tells that museums networks are important in isolated and rural regions as Aysén, where 22 small-medium scale community museums have been operating since the late 20th century, facing geographical dispersion and lack of connectivity; and standing up for the preservation of local identities, through their memories and significant objects. Through a participatory documentation, training workshops and institutional support, the network is overcoming centralisation by building connections that did not exist before between Aysén museums leaders, their communities, stakeholders, researchers and cultural groups. Through collections research, the network is also promoting the safeguard of traditional knowledge linked to the material culture kept by local museums. For the first time in Aysén museums history, partnerships based on knowledge-sharing are supporting rural communities in pursuing the future of their traditions.
The Lure of The East in The Empires of Sight: Does Changing Ownership of Colonial Art Challenge the Notion of Being ‘Colonised by the Gaze’
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elizabeth Carnegie, Derek Bryce
In this paper, I argue that aesthetics shaped to reflect specific ways of knowing the world support national narratives within government-funded or endorsed galleries and museums. In so doing they reflect that nations ‘soft power’ agendas in the present, and are politicised, becoming a tool for managing and shaping ideologies and values within society. This becomes problematic when the art and cultural objects make contemporary critics and curators feel uneasy about how they should interpret them, if they decide they should be seen at all, or even how they should feel when reappraising works that so fully reflect a period in history that remains problematic in the colonial present. I focus this study by looking at how ‘orientalist art’ became to be viewed as a product of such thinking albeit it represents Western artist’s journeys of selfhood explored through the frame of other cultures. How does the recent interest in, acquisition of, and display of Orientalist art in Turkish and Middle Eastern collections impact on the original meanings and aesthetics given to such works at the time of their creation, and indeed as part of art history. Is this a powerful statement of agency and a means to observe the self through the gaze of the Western "other?" Or does it suggest that such art spaces are embracing a new rationalism that transcends aesthetics to become a symbol of ownership, of contemporary self and nation-shaping and indeed in framing the notion of a museum of mankind?
Translating Difficult Histories: The Ulster Museum’s Exhibition ‘The Troubles and Beyond’
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rui Sun
Museum plays an important role in presenting history, especially difficult histories. In this, translation plays a vital role in the dissemination of museum information and is one of the important measures to enhance the visitor experience. Museums and other exhibition venues, such as galleries and heritage sites, offer the fora for presenting difficult histories. As visitor explores the artifacts on display, they receive information and in their own to understand the representation of history and the world around us. A growing increase of interest has emerged on the representation of difficult histories and memory; however, the overlap among museum, memory or difficult histories and translation studies is largely unexplored, and no research has examined the Troubles as a representation of difficult history in the context of translation. This paper discusses the Chinese translation by looking at the representation of the Troubles, a period of dark history happening in Northern Ireland, in the Ulster Museum through a series of exhibitions. Through translation, analysis is employed to examine how the Troubles is interpreted and presented by the Ulster Museum from a translation studies perspective.
