Ana S González Rueda

This paper examines the use of photography as a curatorial counter-strategy against the institutional, governmental agenda in the context of Possessing Nature, the Mexican Pavilion at the 56th International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2015). Artists Luis Felipe Ortega and Tania Candiani developed a site-specific installation in response to curator Karla Jasso’s idea of juxtaposing Venice and Mexico as ‘amphibious cities’. The project re-examined the cities’ historical environmental transformation. Behind the image of Venice as a city miraculously built on the sea lies its struggle to maintain the lagoon’s fragile equilibrium. In the case of Mexico, the Spanish colonisers’ resolution to supplant the Aztec water regulation system and drain the city, marks an irreversible turning point. Conceived under a modernising, developmental narrative, the drainage approach jeopardised indigenous agriculture and sustenance, as well as the pre-Hispanic communal social model. Crucially, this research connected the past to both cities’ current billionaire investment in controversial hydraulic infrastructure. As Project Coordinator, I led the research team in the development of an experimental mediation strategy. The paper focuses on our investigation of the arresting, captivating aspects of Walter Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’, its immediate cognitive potential and its ability to put forward the interaction between the past, the present, and the future. This process involved the recovery and re-activation of archival photography: urban scenes, records of obsolete tunnels and catastrophic floods were repurposed on-site and online as a historiographical intervention to official historical narrative. The paper argues that our approach to mediation was fundamental in constructing the pavilion as a form of active, open-ended research, creating a demanding and stimulating learning atmosphere for the audience, and sustaining the use of the exhibition space as a site of critical analysis.

My project for Deviant Practice examines and reimagines the kinds of knowledge and learning that take place at the museum. I focused on experimenting with feminist materialist pedagogies within the dynamics of the contemporary art collection display: The Way Beyond Art. In particular, I worked with the notion of ‘diffraction’ as a tool to move away from the Cartesian mindset and the strict boundaries between meaning/matter, subject/object, mind/body. The project consists of a ‘movement-as-learning’ session in which we started from postures and gestures that correlated with the feeling of certainty and uncertainty. The group worked with smaller and larger movements and choreographic scaffolding to bring them together. As a form of ‘thinking in action’, this exercise raised the question of what legitimate knowledge looks and feels like. A second session consisted of a seminar with the curatorial and mediation teams. Discussion revolved around visitors’ expectations and the ‘asymmetrical faith in word over world’. We looked into ways of shifting attention to the physical encounter with the artwork, rather than overly relying on explanatory discourse and language. The paper elaborates on these sessions and argues for the relevance of feminist materialist pedagogies to exhibition-making today.

This paper presents a case study of Uriel Orlow’s botany-based political project, organised by the Showroom, London (2016). The collective exhibition was centred around Orlow’s video-installation The Crown Against Mafavuke, a work that re-imagines the trial of South African herbalist Mafavuke Ngcobo, accused in 1940 of ‘untraditional practice’. The case brings to light the conflict and cross-fertilisation between white and indigenous medicine; the former, considered evolving and experimental, the latter coerced to remain fixed and unchanging. I argue that the exhibition put forward a decolonial epistemological challenge to the West. My reading focuses on the use of a ‘conceptual herbarium’ as a critical display strategy that integrated and organised the works into a continent-wide dissenting archive. I contend that the confrontation between the artworks’ positioning of plants as active agents and their installation as specimens revealed the violent imposition of the dominant worldview. I discuss, in particular, photographs by Orlow, Subtle Agency, and David Goldblatt. The exhibition is considered in the context of the crisis of the ethnographic museum in a postcolonial, globalised world and the institutional need to attend to the interrelations between former empires and their colonies, as well as the proliferation of ‘contact zones’ between them. I suggest that the exhibition decentred the sense of a single Western narrative and put forward the epistemological diversity of the world. This critical proposition is relevant not only to understand current global inequalities but for the conception of a more just and sustainable future.

This case study examines Things we don't understand (Generali Foundation, Vienna, 2000) an exhibition curated by Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack that sought to redefine the concept of 'aesthetic autonomy'. The curators attempted to depart from the modernist notion of self-referential autonomy and ground it instead in a theory of experience. Starting from the feeling of irritation caused by not understanding, the exhibition actively investigated the critical potential of interpretative difficulty and explored how the encounter with unfamiliar aesthetic objects affects and changes the viewer. I focus on the educational relations set up and argue that the exhibition put forward an experimental demonstration of the aesthetic experience as a form of self-education. My analysis expounds on the project's introduction of a distinctive mode of relationality. Through the theories of Leo Bersani and Kaja Silverman I observe that by resorting to the interconnectivity between the works and the viewer, the exhibition supported the artworks' simultaneous availability and impenetrability. I read the exhibition's proposition of the idea of knowledge as affection through Jacques Rancière's concept of the 'aesthetic regime'. With this basis, I discuss the interchange and indivisibility between activity and passivity, conscious and unconscious processes, aesthetic autonomy and social change, the viewer and the artwork. Finally, I describe the pedagogical principles more widely relevant to the presentation of contemporary art: the crucial role of the imagination in the encounter of the work, the idea of learning as a movement across boundaries, the case for encouraging questions rather than providing answers, for admitting unpredictable outcomes and acknowledging the viewers’ own creative capacities. I aim to demonstrate that this kind of learning requires curators to refuse to determine what is meaningful, in other words, to refuse to resolve 'things we don’t understand'.

This paper investigates the forms of control that modernity/coloniality exercises on knowledge, the senses, and perception. It concentrates on Ngozi Onwurah’s early films: The Body Beautiful (1990) – held at Central Saint Martins’ British Artists’ Film and Video Collection – and her graduation film Coffee-Coloured Children (1988). Initially concerned with how the films complicate the dominant model of perception as a form of appropriation, my analysis concentrates on Onwurah’s disorienting critical strategies. The first section – Bodies – concentrates on The Body Beautiful and its reflection on illness, drawing from feminist poet and activist Audre Lorde’s account of her experience of breast cancer and mastectomy. I also delve into the film’s depiction of the changing relationship between mother and daughter amidst a complex web of conflicting ways of looking. The second section – Times – considers how Onwurah’s films respond to ‘the most tumultuous decade of Britain’s domestic racial history’ (Akala, 2019), as well as their relevance today. This section addresses the shift from ‘the struggle over the relations of representation to a politics of representation itself’ (Hall, 1992). That is, the process in which critical practices went beyond questions of access, started unsettling either/or thinking and actively producing identity. In particular, I explore how Onwurah’s films prompt us to unlearn our seeing, thinking, and feeling habits. The paper reflects on the discussions of a film and reading group at UAL, which introduced a bell hooks-inspired pedagogy and explored conversation as a place of learning. I intend to move away from Art History’s usual colonisation or settling of its objects through the attachment of meaning. The paper adopts intersectionality as a ‘provisional concept’ to examine the past’s bearing on the present and the future. As an ‘analytic sensibility’ (Carastathis, 2016), intersectionality disorients entrenched cognitive and perceptual habits, encourages both/and thinking, and indicates the work still to be done.

This article examines the complexities of sustaining a critical curatorial approach in the context of the national pavilions at the Venice Biennale. It discusses Possessing Nature, the 2015 Mexican pavilion, from the author’s insider perspective as Project Coordinator. Curated by Karla Jasso, the exhibition presented an installation by Tania Candiani and Luis Felipe Ortega, and was conceived as a site of critical analysis focused on Venice’s and Mexico City’s environmental crises. This case study sheds light on the contradictory politics of the Biennale by exploring the challenges of introducing an experimental approach to mediation and of constructing the exhibition as a site of active research.

Communities and Museums in the 21st Century brings together innovative, multidisciplinary perspectives on contemporary museology and participatory museum practice that contribute to wider debates on museum communities, heritage, and sustainability.

Set within the context of globalisation and decolonisation, this book draws upon bi-regional research that will enrich our understanding of the complex relationships between Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean through museum studies and practice. Chapters reflect upon the role of museums in defining community identities; the importance of young people’s participation and intergenerational work for sustainability; the role of museums in local development; and community-based museums and climate change. Contributors examine these issues through the lens of museum partnerships and practices, as well as testing the continued relevance of the notion of ‘integral museum’ and its relatives in the form of ecomuseums. With its focus on regional museums in Latin America and Caribbean, this book highlights how the case studies promote greater intercultural dialogue, global understanding and social cohesion. It also demonstrates how the methodology can be adapted to other communities who are facing the perils of climate change and unsustainable forms of development.

Communities and Museums in the 21st Century proposes creative and sustainable strategies relevant to a globalised future. With its focus on global societal challenges, this book will appeal to museologists and museum practitioners, as well as those working in heritage studies, cultural studies, memory studies, art history, gender studies, and sustainable development.

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license