Last week, we officially launched artist Lal Davies’ intervention in our exhibition, called ‘Several Stages of Purification’. It forms part of the ‘Perspective(s)’ initiative, a collaboration over the past two years between Arts Council of Wales and Amgueddfa Cymru. Seven artists of diverse backgrounds were invited to each of the national museums to ‘challenge preconceptions and bring marginalised narratives to the fore’. ‘Perspective(s)’ was supported by the Welsh Government, to deliver on Wales’ Anti-Racist Action Plan through decolonising museum narratives.
Decolonising Museums
I am so excited about Amgueddfa Cymru’s commitment to decolonisation. Decolonisation is so much more than provenance research and potential restitution, which for many years has been the focus in museum discourse while I was in Germany. Decolonising an object or an exhibition is about giving voice to those stories that have been silenced. Decolonisation is also about a change in the (power) structures of museums, as the British Museums Association rightly points out.
In so many ways, therefore, what decolonisation seeks to do in the specific context of the colonial past is to create an agonistic (third) space. I’ve written about agonistic interpretation here, and explored the concept of agonistic space further here in relation to my framing of Third Spaces. You can read here about my (very superficial) understanding of Deep Democracy, which relates to my previous work on Third Space.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in response to Lal Davies’ intervention at the Waterfront Museum and our current work on reimagining our museum for the future.
The work
Lal Davies’ intervention is as personal as it is powerful. One piece tells the story of her grandmother’s journey from South India to Wales, adopted as a child by Methodist missionaries. In photographs we see the child transform; the sari is replaced by Western clothes, her Indian identity obscured. Elsewhere, this makes for an uncomfortable juxtaposition, when we see the woman who adopted Lal Davies’ grandmother wear a sari herself.
Then there is the narrative of Swansea copper being shipped to India, where it was transformed into brass wares of just the kind that travelled with Lal Davies’ grandmother to Wales.
My personal favourite is Lal Davies’ handwritten commentary onto pages from a travel book on India. It is sharp and factual, pointing the finger at casually racist remarks that many of us, myself included, may not even have recognised as such.
How it’s done
The intervention is split across several galleries: a TV screen placed along the wall, objects and a film where usually an interactive sits, projections onto walls, a small exhibition at the end of one side gallery. There is also an introduction to the work and an invitation to respond to monthly questions in our main entrance hall, to the side of our current temporary exhibition on the history of the RNLI.
When one engages with these pieces, especially on a guided tour with our curator who supported Lal or with the artist herself, one cannot help but be profoundly moved. This work is deeply thought-provoking. It raises questions about forced assimilation, about cultural appropriation, about suppression coming from a perhaps well-intentioned place. It also delivers a real punch to hegemonic narratives that obscure and distort the heritages, truths and lived experiences of those outside the hegemony. I was particularly struck when at the opening, Lal Davies spoke about learning her own history from museums who, it turns out, did not tell her the whole story.
Creating a Decolonised Agonistic Third Space
On one hand, there is real power in the way the intervention is just that: a visibly different add-on. It stands out and disrupts. The artist’s personal voice is authentic in ways that a museum narrative possibly never could be.
On the other hand, I am very conscious of the fact that in a few months’ time, the work will be taken down. Of course we can continue bringing in different ‘perspectives’, and in fact we’ve tentatively started a conversation around just that. And naturally as we update the fixed interpretation, we will reflect and represent the stories that Lal Davies has highlighted.
However, as we’re thinking of the stories a future exhibition could tell, I’m really interested in how we can push ourselves on creating a space where other perspectives can emerge and enter into a debate beyond facilitated projects. I’m not ‘just’ thinking about co-creative processes here – to me, these are a given by now. I’m interested in creating opportunities for all people that come to our museum to add and share their perspective. I’d like to enable others to engage with contributions and comment and expand. I’m interested in exploring a (physical) interpretive infrastructure that allows for a circular, on-going process of storytelling that takes account of people’s responses. In other words, I’m interested in how an exhibition can become an agonistic Third Space that lives and changes with the people that come to it.
What could that look like?
Nicole Deufel's Blog 