Narrative Nuance
Memory and the Archive: The Role of Personal and Communal Narratives in Reframing Museum Collections and Practices View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Adetola Abatan
As a female creative with roots in Yoruba and American culture, understanding my cultural heritage has been both informed and hindered by the archives preserved within museums and cultural institutions. Recently, several scholars have stated that the archives preserved within such organizations are never “neutral” but instead preserve colonial systems by elevating Western cultures and devaluing others. Too often then, objects from ‘devalued’ cultures are left in stagnant exhibitions without contextual ties to the cultures from which they came and how those cultures have evolved with time; a missed opportunity at best and gross negligence at worst that reinforces old stereotypes and primitivism. How can archival objects be put in dialogue with contemporary artists who are bridging the gaps to the past in their work? Could giving these objects a contextual voice increase interest and community engagement? In this paper, the role of the visual arts in critiquing and recontextualizing Black/African cultural arts is examined through a racial iconography and decolonial lens, specifically the Remembering and Reframing Indigenous Projects as defined by Linda Tuhiwai-Smith. This research was then put in practice as the ‘Blue is Our Color’ exhibit at the Hedreen Gallery in 2022, which showcased indigo textiles from West Africa in dialogue with cyanotype photographs, fabric collages and vibrant abstractions from the Pacific Northwest. As a visual thread, blue was used to represent a version of Blackness and African-ness that holds much more than stagnant history and simplistic ideas of identity.
The Museum is the Message: Melding McLuhan, Media Literacy, and Museum Studies View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Moscowitz
Marshall McLuhan’s familiar maxim, the medium is the message, comports well to contemporary museum studies, particularly when considering the values of inclusion and equity. McLuhan’s main point was to reify media form as equally worthy of study and critique as media content. Likewise, when considering museums as sites of study and critical spaces for culture and community, we should pay attention to museum form as much as we do to museum content. This study considers the interdependency of museums and media literacy studies within a DEI-infused learning environment by examining four pedagogical criteria: architecture, ethics, the role of trauma, and an aesthetics of care.
Waterways Exhibition Design: Crafting Cross-cultural Narratives through Spatial Design View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sepideh Saffari, Aleksandra Dulic
This paper reports on the spatial design of the immersive and interactive multimodal exhibition, Waterways, Past, Present and Future, created for museum display. The work provides a nuanced interpretation of the fragile relationship between people and water in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia. The exhibit enables visitors to discover and celebrate cross-cultural perspectives regarding sustainable water practices, featuring the voices of the Indigenous Syilx community to emphasize the resilience and success sorties in environmental protection. The exhibition employs multimodal communication methods, i.e., spatial, pictorial, verbal, and aural elements. However, this paper focuses on the spatial design process, as an integrative mode, which connects different exhibition themes and weaves multiple modes of communication together. The final design is the embodiment of a reflective conversation between research and creative practice, creating an informative and pedagogical space to immerse visitors in the Okanagan waterways' history and narrative.
