“An uncompromising clarity of vision in art carriers spiritual, political and ecological meaning.”
Our world is shaped by overlapping global crises, social upheaval and political disruption, with growing societal fragmentation and isolation intensified by rapid technological advancements and an economic system that fosters inequality.
And to address pressing questions of representation, institutional critique, and the possibilities of reimagining the museum from within, museums need kinds of experimental pockets, spaces that get torn down and rebuilt conceptually, again and again.
The work and spaces must call for sustained, systemic self-criticism as a moral imperative, despite the inherent contradictions and potential for failure, reflecting on the changes of human behaviour—from the banality of evil to complicity and indifference.
With the colonial aphasia of our country’s imperial past, continues the project by exposing racism and before and after apartheid, and culminates in a response to depicting how the atrocities of the war against colonialism, white supremacist nationalism, racism, and capitalism remain inextricably intertwined within the present reality.
Evidently, ideological violence against black histories and subjectivities enriches artistic languages of dissent and deepens intercultural approaches to restitution of immense social ills that are refracted through concepts articulated through various collections in museums and galleries.
Walking through colonial museums is an artistic and political act, one that fosters contemplation and connection within the chaos of the worlds we inhabit; worlds that unfold across the museum spaces, guides memory through themed environments that aim to enchant even as they unsettle.
At this juncture in the heated debate around representation of erased identities within museums, can artists explore uneasy questions around the commodification of historical trauma through mass-tourism experiences?
When we map each city’s iconic landmarks, tracing the emotional and sensory textures of contemporary life, one notices a thriving intercultural dynamism that is both commemorative of shared experiences and trauma. These spaces also afford opportunities fo healing.
The complexities of continuity of cultural heritage, craft, and artisanship—including sites and practices across the country that are under threat require interventions from the same museums which claim to be harbingers of hope for an unexpected future of museums.
And by foregrounding censored local cultural histories through the revival of craft practices and the preservation of the region’s globally-important material heritage, these spaces can device new ways of engaging with the past and its traumatic emblems; with a sense of inquisitiveness and resolve.
These new spaces, coordinated by inspired curators, can continue to support the need to generate new narratives, advocate for transparency as opt for a fluid and associative approach that mirrors the very nature of contemporary artistic and preservatory practice.
These new museums are thus not conceived as dead sammelsuria of documents, artefacts and paintings, but as a permeable, shifting structure—shaped by the practices it holds and continually transformed through engagement
Unlike traditional museums, the new spaces should cease to be the bizarre repositories of complex memories but spaces that extend into the archival realm, exploring how archives can hold memory to account, not only as traces or as records but also as “objects or subjects” still unfolding—forms that resists capture yet persists.
Part of the evolving roles of such institutions in shaping cultural memory, is inviting artists to consider archives not as a closed system, but as permeable sites—where the past is in motion and the performative continues to unfold
French philosopher Jacques Rancière (b. 1940), understood art not simply as tools of artistic production, but as a “sensory milieu”—an environment that reshapes how we perceive and experience the world as a multilayered space for thought that expands the boundaries of perception and awareness.
When we begin to view and hear these artefacts as subjects on equal footing with humans, adorning them with human qualities of wisdom, strength of will and all traits of cunning intelligence, we must therefore begin raising questions about how people affect and reshape the meanings of these artefacts, sculptures, into archival knowledge.
As battlefields occupied by the living and the dead, curators of these reimagined museum spaces must engage in new dialogues with recent acquisitions and animate the ghosts that accompany and haunt our present, through processes where history and memory converge.
There is a need for new heroism that is not centred around colonial personalities and events; a re-evaluation of human rights violations lorded s acts of victory by settlers, their plunder of indigenous lands should be viewed from the lens of social displacement on a scale that was never hear of.
To counteract the idea of sculptural monumentality enjoyed by the many gladiatorial monstrosities of colonial adoration, these canonised idols of power need to be re-viewed without filters of nationalism and biases of culture dominate.
That eternally cowering gaze of the native towards imperial artefacts should be dissolved through archeologically rigorous research and authentication of events, names attached to heroisms of the past; an open-mindedness that fosters sensitivity toward social issues with conflicting perspectives.
These figures require a new eye to perceive beyond the veils of purported power, to reveal the sycophantic desires of European low caste personages who found bounty to plunder in far off lands, tracing their subtle yet startling connections to political, social and popular demonisation of indigenous persons.
And this project requires a visual language that serves to unburden the representation of marginalised bodies within the colonial milieu; unfaltering the colonisers’ gazes for a vivid and unprejudiced view of the human-ness of the subjugated.
The new museums for new imaginaries becomes each artist's site in a multidimensional way, a space where individual artists’ cultural backgrounds and sensory languages intersect, their works unfolding as ongoing processes.
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