Twelfth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

With the re-examination of the role of “public space” within an expanded, post-colonial idea of public cultural institutions, comes the dilemma of the continuing representation of the archives on which galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) institutions were founded—archives that form an important historical record, but that were themselves formed by colonialist imperatives. How can de-contextualised archival objects be re-embodied in experience, given the innate demands of archival practice? Most importantly, for whom are these objects re-embodied? This paper examines the Queensland Museum’s 2015 exhibition “This Is My Heritage” as a case study—the roles of art and audience, and the creation of affect in historical display. In this exhibition, Indigenous artists were given access to the Museum’s collected Indigenous materials, and asked to find one that “spoke” to them across time; the show itself consists of photos of the artists holding their chosen objects, along with the stories they tell about the moment of encountering the object. The “exhibition” thus exhibits not the objects themselves, to an abstract audience called the public, but the historical affect those objects engendered in a number of individuals—specifically, Indigenous persons, whose heritage is represented in the archive, but whose presence is often unacknowledged in the rhetorical structure of the museumgoing “public”. The role of primary audience of the archive is undertaken by these artists; the public is the secondary audience. The end result is a record of a transient moment of embodied experience, with objects that, as always, remain distant from the visitor.