Seventeenth International Conference on the Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Recent work on critical museology and decolonization has established the various ways in which the formation of encyclopedic or universal museums in Europe and the United States was intertwined with histories of colonialism and racism. However, much work remains to be done in reimagining both the form and content of exhibition didactics, especially with an eye towards questioning the assumed neutrality of the empirical knowledge presented to the public and highlighting the pervasive power relationships between institutions and their visitors. In this paper, I take as an example the foundational and still resilient narrative of the Mesopotamian “discovery” featuring a European archaeologist operating single-handedly in a presumed terra incognita. I argue that the enlistment of the putatively self-evident notion of “discovery” as an explanatory model in museological and archaeological narratives has served to gloss over the millennia-long histories of local engagement with ancient Western Asian sites. By critically engaging with the didactics of several permanent and temporary exhibitions and with my own work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I stress that even those exhibition didactics that are designed to convey objective, empirical facts are eventually prone to conceal more than they reveal.