Museum Transformations. Группа авторов

in emphasis from the museum as a repository and a place where the authoritative knowledge of academically trained curators is disseminated to the public, to the museum as a site of dialogue, debate, healing, and advocacy for social justice. Stimulated by desires to further democratization and decolonization, museums have sought to introduce new voices and perspectives into their displays and narratives, and they have also looked for new modes of outreach that can deliver museum collections, exhibitions, and programs to larger, more diverse, and often distant publics. Christopher Morton and Gilbert Oteyo, in Chapter 14, have explored the ethical and intellectual issues raised when attempting to exhibit archival photographs from different periods in Kenya’s history to the communities represented in them. In Chapter 16 Kimberly Christen discusses the challenges, benefits, and transformational impacts on conventional museum practices of online curating in her analysis of projects involving the Waramungu Aboriginal community in the Central Desert of Australia and the Inuvialuit peoples of the western Canadian Arctic (see Khan 2002; Lang, Reeve, and Wollard 2006; Harrison, Byrne, and Clarke 2013).

      To be fully realized, however, the transformation of the museum must engage all areas of museum activity, not only exhibitions and research, but also education, marketing, and even registration and conservation. Miriam Clavir’s chapter (17) examines the challenges to traditional Western concepts of conservation, a profession with particularly close ties to Western concepts of science and historical preservation. She shows how some museum conservators have sought to create more elastic practices informed not just by the priority of physical preservation but also by diverse concepts of cultural preservation. Clavir developed her own approach at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology, an institution that also introduced the model of visible storage into modern museology in 1976. Indigenous artists have used this facility, which makes collections visibly accessible to the general public in glass-fronted cases and plexiglass-topped drawers, to study historical works as sources for their own renewal of these carving traditions – a notable artistic development that was gaining momentum during those years. In the 2010 redesign of its visible storage, the museum took a further and more transformative step. Rather than organizing its collections, as previously, according to a Western system of classification, it consulted members of originating communities regarding how they wanted their collections to be ordered and displayed. Jennifer Kramer’s chapter (21) discusses one of the museum’s consultations and the resulting installation. Gwyneira Isaac (Chapter 13) explores the related example of the Zuni nation’s A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center in conversation with its director, Jim Enote. There, too, an Indigenous community is using the development of its museum as a context for recovering Indigenous modes of conceptualizing and categorizing knowledge.

The emphasis on social action that grew out of movements of decolonization and institutional critique has coincided with a technological revolution whose transformative impact has reached into every corner of human activity. Museums have sought to exploit new media not only to enhance their physical exhibitions and expand their publics, but also to archive their own exhibitionary histories. Critical museology, with its focus on museum and exhibition histories, has drawn renewed attention to institutional archives and their value in documenting progressive phases of experimentation. Reesa Greenberg’s chapter (20) explores the highly variable ways in which a series of landmark feminist art exhibitions have been documented on their respective museums’ websites. Her analysis illustrates the almost serendipitous nature of the permanent legacy left by even the largest and most revisionist of temporary exhibition projects. While some of these sites attempt to reproduce a real-space exhibition and thereby extend its life, others preserve an archival record of the exhibition as a past historical event. As Greenberg shows, the contrasting structures and levels of information required by these different approaches are not always well defined in relation to web design, inclusiveness of data, and other features.

      But new media also have necessary limitations and these are perhaps most evident in the social dimensions of museum experience that are lost in the creation of virtual exhibitions. These can either be adaptations of real-space exhibitions or self-standing entities that have no real-space correlatives. Here, too, a great deal of experimentation has been underway, but certain limitations are intrinsic to the medium, as exemplified by the web versions of the two exhibitions commemorating Canadian Aboriginal residential schools that are discussed by Jonathan Dewar in Chapter 4. Like other virtual exhibitions, they can be accessed anywhere the Internet is available, and they will be seen by people unable to visit the physical exhibits. But they will also largely be viewed in isolation, without the social bonding that is possible when visitors share an experience in real time and space. The transformative power of new media is, however, most evident in its ability to create access to heritage materials for viewers who may be located thousands of kilometers away from its physical storage. In this context, Paul Basu’s discussion of the Sierra Leone Heritage website in Chapter 15 shows how inventive uses of web technology can make it possible to combine remote access to collections, multivocal interpretation, and the exhibition of intangible culture in ways not possible in conventional museum spaces.

       Conclusion

Change in museums, as in other institutions of modernity, results from negotiations of traditions and adaptations of technologies. The case studies presented in this volume evidence the importance of pressures exerted on museums for decolonization and greater democratization. Both, of course, have deep roots in twentieth-century cultural politics, but they have gained momentum from the speeded-up flows of capital, people, and media and their active engagements with institutions shaped by imperialism and modernity (Appadurai 1996). We opened this introduction by posing a question about the degree to which these changes amount to something we could call “transformation,” understood as a true paradigm shift that has evolved in response to these new demands and opportunities.

      We would like to end where we began – with a Northwest Coast masquerade performance, this time by the contemporary Git Hayetsk dance group.²⁸ The group’s cofounder Mique’l Dangeli has explained the functions of their masked dances, past and present, as sites for transgenerational knowledge transmission and reflection on historical experience – roles that closely parallel those assigned to the modern museum. As an academic scholar, she has also researched the work of B. A. Haldane, a pioneering Tsimshian photographer who had a prolific practice in Dangeli’s community of Metlakatla, Alaska, during the early twentieth century. Although Haldane’s photographs document both community members’ accommodations of modernity and their resistance to the erasure of their traditions, his work had been forgotten in the late twentieth century (Dangeli forthcoming). Dangeli decided to restore knowledge silenced by the colonial archive in two complementary ways, one modern and museological and the other traditional and performative. In 2007 she arranged an exhibition of Haldane’s photographs at Metlakatla,²⁹ and in 2009 she created the Visual Sovereignty Dance, centering on a new nax nox, or ceremonial being (see Figure 0.4):

      FIGURE 0.4 Visual Sovereignty Dance performed by Git Hayetsk at Masq’alors! International Mask Festival, St. Camille, Quebec, 2013.

      Courtesy of Mique’l Dangeli. Photo: Valerie Calusic.

During the dance four of B.A.’s photographs are revealed … The dance reaches a climax towards the end where the nax nox [masked dancer] creates new images by taking digital photographs of witnesses and the context of the performance. The nax nox turning the camera on to the viewers is a declaration of visual sovereignty in honor of today’s Indigenous photographers whose process of creation changes as new technology develops, all the while remaining deeply rooted in Indigenous visuality and ways of knowing. (Dangeli forthcoming).

      The museum and its collections are, of course, key components of