Global Links
How Museums Can Contribute to the SDGs and Be Inclusive Spaces: Best Practice Examples by ICOM Austria
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Doris Rothauer, Bettina Leidl
In 2021, ICOM Austria invited 17 Museums Austrianwide to contribute with specific activities and projects to the 17 SDGs. Due to the success of “17x17” the initiative continued in 2022 with 10 Museums from Vienna. The paper highlights insights on the working process, the methods, the challenges, the outcomes and the impact. Another initiative, the Museum Guide on Inclusion & Accessibility, showcases 130 Austrian Museums on what they offer to make their museums inclusive spaces. The project started as a printed guide in 2023 and will continue to grow with an extended edition in 2024 and as an online platform. Learnings from both initiatives should encourage and inspire others to take similar steps.
“These Molecules of the Ordinary”: Recipes as Cultural Narratives
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nina Finigan
Recipes are ubiquitous things. We grow up hearing their words recited in kitchens like mantras, or seeing them on food splattered pages propped up on kitchen benches. But their quotidian nature belies their significance. Family recipes are precious cultural narratives that can tell us important things about what it is to be human: identity, migration, community, belonging, intergenerational knowledge and cultural adaptation to name a few. But, generally speaking, they are nowhere to be found in museum collections. What does this omission tell us about what histories, knowledge and experiences have traditionally been valued by museums? What would it mean to create an archive of recipes and food narratives within a museum? And how would concerns of representation and inclusion be addressed by such an endeavor? This paper explores these questions through the lens of an ongoing recipe collecting project at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland Museum, which holds the central question - how is ‘the recipe’ a cultural narrative? As well as exploring these narratives, this paper will explore shifting curatorial practice within this project, which centers a collaborative model of collection development and elevates conversation and storytelling over object-based collecting. It will also consider how a recipe - so specific to time, place and person/community - can foster inclusion, connection and a sense of the universal.
Can Local Museums Create Global Awareness?
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nancy Rocio Rueda Esteban
The role of small local museums in Colombia usually only focuses as indirect education institutions on specific topics such as history, geography, and natural history, among others; dedicated only to the past and to be a reservoir of collections. Nonetheless, these small museums should go beyond the past and start creating discussions and awareness on global social, economic, and environmental issues. Using the past as a lever to introduce modern topics and help to generate knowledge in local communities and young people on important subjects for today’s society such as black lives matter, global warming, modern colonization, modern slavery, feminism, conflicts, economic crisis, and so on. Internationally a museum in Hiroshima helps awareness on the use of atomic weapons, another in Nottingham about the death penalty worldwide, and in Curaçao, a small museum introduces the fight against racism. Given the new role of museums nowadays, the only museums called to be active actors in everyday lives should not be the nationally and internationally renowned ones. Local institutions, called to create awareness and knowledge of local history should also go beyond the past and bring the important topics closer to local communities, given that in many cases it is the only place where these discussions can be created. The research is a comparative analysis of five international small museums that develop modern social subjects with five small local museums in Colombia, and study how they can develop exhibitions and open spaces for discussions with local communities.
Exhibiting Artemisia Gentileschi: Fame, Feminism and the Global Blockbuster
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christopher R. Marshall
This paper analyses the 20th - 21st-century exhibition history of Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-ca. 1656) as a case study highlighting the key role played by international loan exhibitions in conferring a certain type of canonical art historical status on a select group of Old Master artists. Gentileschi constitutes a significant addition to this charmed circle of ‘blockbuster worthy’ individuals, since she attained a significant degree of international fame both during her own lifetime and beyond. Modern exhibitions dedicated to her oeuvre thus provide a much-needed counter narrative to the standard Old Master exhibition, which generally highlights the unique contributions of leading male artists such as Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rubens and so on. Yet, the paper argues, Gentileschi has been consistently presented in these exhibitions in ways that run the risk of reducing her artistic significance down to either her gender or the backstory of trauma and sexual violence that has tended to dominate standard accounts of her biography and early career. A recent exhibition held in Genoa (Palazzo Ducale, November 16, 2023 to April 1, 2024) might nonetheless suggest a growing recognition of the need to develop alternative modes of communicating her significance to future audiences. The groundswell of negative response to the so-called ‘rape room’ that formed a central component of this exhibition’s gallery sequencing suggests the increasing influence of new perspectives on Gentileschi that have been gaining momentum following the #MeToo and associated cultural movements of the past decade.
