Object(ive) View of Contested Collection
Queenie Huang
Advisor: Daniel Shiffman, Alexander Porter
A meta-exhibition allowing visitors to embody a museum object from their own cultural context in approaching the topic of repatriation with an empathetic lens.
Abstract
An immersive installation that brings visitor through the journey of how an object arrives at the museum. It starts with audio and tactile hints of auction, transportation and conservation that leads to visitors to inside a display box at a museum space, before providing more concrete examples of actual cases of repatriation in a storage space. By experiencing the process and recontextualization an object undergoes, it prompts a deeper understanding of the complexities attached to contested cultural objects by relating it to personal emotions and experiences.
Technical Details
A mixed-media installation with audio and tactile components, as well as projection contents rendered in Unreal Engine 5 and mapped with MadMapper.
Research/Context
The focus of this project is on the process of repatriation, which means the return of cultural belongings to their country or community of origin in the museum context. It started with the investigation into how museums represent culture through objects and what that means to museum visitors and the communities or cultures represented. No matter how objective the museum presents the objects, the history, politics and context of each museum changes the meaning attached to the experience, but acknowledging that, museum as a learning space is still very valuable. Through this project, I attempted to investigate alternative ways to approach museum objects, specifically contested ones under the process of repatriation, through the act of embodiment.
Further Reading
Contested Holdings: Museum Collections in Political, Epistemic and Artistic Processes of Return, edited by Felicity Bodenstein, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2022.
Designing for Empathy : Perspectives on the Museum Experience, edited by Elif M. Gokcigdem, American Alliance of Museums, 2019.
Lidchi, Henrietta. "The poetics and the politics of exhibiting other cultures" Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Sage, 1997. Open University and Stuart Hall.
The Thing about Museums : Objects and Experience, Representation and Contestation, edited by Sandra Dudley, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2011.