Curator: The Museum Journal最新文献

This article uses autoethnography to explore objects from Zambia, Hong Kong, and Ireland, dated between 1848 and the 1990s. It explores subjective conceptualizations of the “colonial object,” and seeks to disrupt imperialist narratives as well as to decenter the white family from which its examples come. The paper discusses the objects as potential sites for developing transcultural collaboration, and examines their relevance to decolonization in the Anthropocene.

As I approach my ninth and final year as the Editor of Curator: The Museum Journal, I reflect on the remarkable journey of the past decade. We've experienced extraordinary growth in readership and a shift in our editorial board to better represent our international readership. Initiatives like a multilingual translations program and updated ethics policies, especially recognizing community members involved in participatory action research as authors, are now part of our core values. In 2023, we also concluded a 2-year study with Drs. Rafie Cecelia and Theano Moussouri from University College London that now provides guidance to authors on how to write detailed figure descriptions that enhance accessibility to screen readers for our online content.

Throughout my tenure, we've seen consistent growth in contributions that rigorously assess museum practice and theory through larger scale comparative studies. While my concern about the dominance of single case studies in our archive, we are starting to witness a noteworthy trend—the increasing involvement of museum professionals as guest editors for special issues, and researchers taking on field wide questions with representative data. We see more of these trends reflected in the special issues published in the last few years, whether on materials like ivory or phenomena like sound. These scholarly efforts provide critical insights that challenge the museum movement to reconsider the societal service it provides. The current issue builds on this practice by presenting one of the critical concerns of our current era: How museums can use their power to rectify the field's collusion in suppressing peoples and culture.

This period in the museum industry signifies a crucial moment in redefining practices. The MoHoA movement challenges equity and dominance hierarchies, steering away from Eurocentric orthodoxy. This shift suggests the current museum definition will require an update soon. Situated under the theme of the Anthropocene, this work acknowledges the existential crises museums face related to material culture and human expansion.

Guest editors Dr. Edward Denison and Editorial Board Member Dr. Shahid Vawda led this issue on behalf of a global network working to decolonize modern history in the museum sector. Their commitment represents a pivotal moment in the museum movement, emphasizing critical thinking as a foundation for challenging conventions.

We first published the draft version of The Cape Town Document in July 2022. In this issue, we publish the most recent consensus version of The Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage as an open access public document. It is a watershed manifesto that calls on museum and heritage professionals to reshape what we know as cultural memory, advocating for a shift in positionality and acknowledging pluralities and intersectional issues. This document, as a community product, also exemplifies the best of what can be achieved with open

This special edition of Curator on Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene draws on the 2nd International MoHoA conference of the same title held from October 26 to 28, 2022, at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UK), in partnership with the University of Liverpool's School of Architecture. As a global collaborative established in 2020, MoHoA is concerned with decentring the theory and practice of modern heritage and joins the wider global effort to decolonize institutional practices that engage with the research, collection, valorization, or transformation of material culture associated with our collective recent past—from museum curators and creative practitioners to academics, and the built environment professions. Founded on the fact that our precarious present reflects an inequitable past and a perilous future, MoHoA asserts that modern heritage—inextricably bound as it is to Western notions of progress, modernization, and modernity—conceptually, practically, and as artifact, uniquely and disproportionately privileges western, invariably white, experiences and values. Unlike other kinds or classifications of heritage, modern heritage also reflects the existential paradox central to MoHoA whereby the cultural legacies of our recent past are simultaneously of modernity and yet threatened by its consequences. Through its workshops, conferences, publications, and website, MoHoA provides a platform for sharing knowledge, methods, and approaches that challenge the modernist canon and support the construction of new epistemologies centered not on race, color, or ethnicity but on humankind and our self-inflicted precarious position on this planet. This epistemic and canonical reconfiguration has important implications for museums and heritage practice globally as the reconstitution of modern heritage and its associated modes of knowledge production and registers will direct the composition of collections, lists, and archives away from mythologizing hegemonic Western epistemic traditions, to reflect instead decentred planetary experiences, whether human or non-human. An important outcome of this collective and restitutive endeavor is the publication of The Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage, an equitable and decentering policy proposal presented to UNESCO and its advisory bodies in 2023.

While framing the importance of everyday life as a drive for institutional exhibitions, this paper investigates the process of home making in Tehran from 1925 to 2013. The period 1925–1979 marks the rule of the Pahlavi dynasty when modernization was systematically implemented in Iran. This period ended with the Iranian revolution, which laid the foundation for a welfare state, which in spite of great promises declined in essence at the end of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency in 2013 when the country moved towards privatization while welcoming non-Western imperialism. Using domestic objects and cultural rituals, the investigation reveals how the domestic realm reflects local and global politics that have shaped the country for the last hundred years. The paper argues that the domestic realm has been a significant everyday context for mediating two grounds simultaneously: On the one hand, it pursues central planning strategies to secure various states' political gains; and, on the other, it serves as a platform for tactics that resist these strategies through spatial and material expressions.

Photography—what Barthes called “the living image of a dead thing”—is often overlooked in discussions of cultural heritage decolonization. This paper focuses on a historical photograph attributed to the Hong Kong commercial photographer Lai Fong 黎芳, also known as Afong, that documents the aftermath of the Tianjin massacre of 1870. A photographic print of the image is held in the Robert Hart collection, a little-known collection of historical photographs accumulated by the Irishman Robert Hart during his half-century as an administrator in China. Like many such collections—and like Tianjin itself in the late Qing period—the photography collection resists easy categorization, and sits uneasily between Europe and Asia, Chinese and foreign, imperial and anti-imperial. This essay proposes a “photoanthropocene” perspective, drawing on theoretical writing by Mirzoeff, Zylinska, and others to locate colonial photography within the early anthropocene. The photoanthropocene offers new ways to understand, interpret, and decolonize colonial photography.

‘Digitization’ is a logical operation that deconstructs information and transforms it into digits, rendering it a logical construct. Digital operations are fast, infinitely replicable, objective, and absolute. But digitization is not without costs: the result of operationalizing information is that it becomes abstract—disconnected from its referent, and subject to processes that alter its representation without detection. Visions of modernity that draw on the potential for digital technology to invariably raise standards of living fail to consider the intrinsic properties of the digital that tend toward replicability, speed, and scalability, which favor globalization. This article argues how, through reductive processes, the discrete, mathematical nature of the digital provides a framework for rationality and order that is fundamentally incompatible with multiple modernities. Moreover, the history of digital machines is intricately linked to education and epistemology across North America and South Africa. The mechanization of learning illustrates the promise, power, and potential consequence of digital operations; by limiting our horizons, the Modern and now the Digital, limits our ability to think, thereby concealing the destruction of society, nature, and us as a species.

This article examines the history of Kharaghoda, an important site of colonial salt extraction located on the edge of the Little Rann of Kutch, Gujarat. It highlights relationships between development and ecology through analysis of colonial documents published between 1872 and 1940. The intention at Kharaghoda was to enforce colonial political agendas through the construction of infrastructure on what was seen as an empty site. However, contrary to a tabula rasa condition, records suggest a complex relationship with site ecologies. In particular, nature was not uniformly sublimated by the project, but exerted influence on a rapidly fluctuating built environment. The article presents developments thematically, with each investigating the archives and corresponding developments chronologically. By foregrounding the ecological voice within the archives it advocates for a definition of modern heritage that recognizes interactions between nature and built environments to suggest future possibilities for conservation acknowledging human and nonhuman agencies.

How do museum professionals know that the institutions they serve are valued by the public? And who are the public or publics being served? Why should museums be trusted? It can be argued that one of the most important elements of professional knowledge is an understanding of the publics we serve and what the people who constitute these publics value in, and about museums. Despite its importance, the question has been little studied. This paper uses two national public opinion surveys conducted in Canada nearly 50 years apart to document changing perceptions of museums in Canada over the last half century and places their findings in the context of comparative studies in the United States, Europe, and Britain. The paper also looks at the curious tension between what museum professionals think about museums and what the public says about them, and how this can shape museum theory and practice.

Modern heritage encompasses not only the physical structures but also the narratives, ideas, and sociohistorical dynamics associated with them. This study explores the multifaceted aspects of modern heritage in Turkey, focusing on early republic housing projects built between 1930 and 1939. Tracing the signs of being “modern” in residential architecture, this research proposes that Kemalist reforms affecting social life served as tools to alter appearances, and behind that image, the persistence of the cultural and social life was hidden. Analyzing projects in Arkitekt journal, it identifies traditional living patterns in so-called modern houses, emphasizing the impossibility of copying-and-pasting modernity. In Turkey, modernity was neither unequivocally endorsed nor rejected; instead, it intertwined with existing social structures, creating a unique entity. Thus, it concludes that the value of early republic Turkish modern residentials lies not in formal similarities to European forms of modernism but in a transcultural understanding that embraces diverse expressions of modernity.