Seventeenth International Conference on the Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Curators working in regional cultural institutions hold the power to participate in the shaping of the cultural narrative of their regions, nations, peoples and communities. Like schools, religious centers and government institutions, they can become powerful agents in duplicating and reinforcing dominant social and governing agendas. At the heart of my study is the notion that inclusivity in culture is based on the re-visitation of regional, subjugated, situated knowledges that have been hidden by colonial superstructures in areas that have been under colonial occupations. The paper focuses on a series of exhibitions and events that took place in the Negev – in part curated by myself – to examine how and why the curatorial agendas of Negev cultural institutions replicate global cultural norms and operate according to a western point of view on culture. Specifically, how and why Negev institutions shy away from forms of culture that raise topics about conflictual issues like land, land-use and land-rights, which would challenge existing dominant social and governing agendas. Drawing my analysis from a series of exhibitions that I curated during my four-year curatorial post as the founder and curator of two institutions in the Negev desert the lecture fleshes out artistic and curatorial interventions that demonstrate the potential for queering of culture and for looking “sideways” at hegemonic global divisions to complicate core binaries: east/west and center/periphery – and to consider counter-curatorial methods that could challenge the westernized curatorial methods that dominate cultural institutions in regions distant from dominant cultural centers.