Illustration: Kübrasu Yıldırım

“...we’re going to be tiny little renaissance palazzos where the people  are outside tilling the fields and the big people are up there looking on”

Bonnie Greer

For as long as I’ve visited museums, I’ve always left feeling like a Mr. Potato-Head figure that had been put together all wrong. It has never been the reverent experience that my (usually white) peers describe. I always left feeling agitated, defeated, and convinced that maybe something was wrong with me- that I was ‘doing’ museums wrong. Museums left me feeling drained in ways that never made sense to me. This was quite the pickle I found myself in since, as an art history major, I had to spend a considerable amount of my time in museums and art galleries. Growing up, I was always more interested in the stories behind the objects and in understanding the cultural contexts that birthed them than I was in the objects in and of themselves. That’s why I chose Art History! I’d looked forward to learning about the different cultural lenses through which these historical objects were made. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Instead, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the reason these spaces made me feel so disconnected and disengaged was that they weren’t made for, or with, people like me in mind. When I, an Indian woman, am in these spaces it is colonially rooted ideas of myself and people like me that are reflected back to us. 

It is from this perspective that I want to discuss a live-streamed panel discussion titled The Circulation of Objects: The Politics of Recording, Training, Preserving, and Sharing that was hosted by the Art Newspaper on the 2nd of May. The panel consisted of Anaïs Aguerre (Cultural Strategy Advisor and Founder of Culture Connect Ltd, ReACH Project Director), Jerry Brotton (Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London), Hartwig Fischer (Director of the British Museum), Richard Kurin (Smithsonian Distinguished Scholar and Ambassador-at-Large) and Bonnie Greer (OBE, playwright, author and critic, Former Trustee of the British Museum). This panel was chaired by Simon Schaffer (Professor of History of Science, Cambridge University). Organized around Factum Foundation’s new book The Aura in The Age of Digital Materiality – Rethinking Preservation in the Shadow of an Uncertain Future, this second instalment of a three-part series focused on the unprecedented opportunities presented to museums and cultural institutions by digital technologies. During the discussion some panellists’ ideas, for example, their vision of a digital platform for their institution’s collections, their approach to the digital divide, and their odd, neutered reinterpretations of the museum’s imperial past did not sit well with me. When going deeper than the face value of their well-intentioned comments, the real-world implications of the systems their ideas perpetuated seemed to contradict the win-win narrative they were constructing around new digital technologies in cultural heritage spaces. Instead, I felt like they ended up perpetuating a system that has naturalised whiteness as the status quo. There was no recognition, except by Greer, of the flaws of the system they worked within and how those flaws cause perpetuating harm. In sticking to the win-win narrative and with blinders on to anything that strayed away from it, the panel, save for Greer, missed the opportunity to have a constructive discussion about something that could have possibly been an avenue for real institutional self-reflection!

Schaffer opened up the discussion by asking the panel to comment on the unprecedented opportunities afforded to the museum by digital technology and to also reflect on whether these opportunities were unprecedented. Within this context, Kurin brought up the possibilities for global curation by digitising museum collections. I think his point was that the transaction could move from something top-down in terms of the visitor being a passive consumer to something more active. To him, in “offering their perspectives and narratives about the object”, these visitors also had the opportunity to be producers of knowledge. This digitised platform for a global curation of narratives sounds very much like crowdsourcing information- which in and of itself is a great idea. However, to me, it also implied that BIPoC people were being asked to contribute emotional and intellectual labour without compensations, which made it problematic. This is especially so when contextualised within the legacy of looting and other forms of taking-without-compensation.

Euro-American museums were imagined into being as part of imperialism’s infrastructure of extraction, and with the proposed platform, it feels like museums have yet to do the introspective work needed to disengage from this part of their history. To me, the Euro-American museum’s extraction has only grown more sophisticated over time. It has shifted away from explicit exploitation to something veiled by a myth of altruism, service, and equality. I say myth because having worked in this industry as a non-Euro-American woman of colour I have experienced first-hand its whiteness-centred reality. Coming back to the panel’s discussion, you see the equality narrative play out in the language used by Fischer when he talks about digitised content “exploding the possibilities for access to everyone” and that it will allow people to share alternative narratives “as members of the community of human beings…as equals”. Aguerre’s statements about “giving voices to people” and “giving them a say on their heritage” speak to the altruistic element of the myth. This same apparent altruism is apparent when Fischer and Kurin talk about their work in Iraq. In Fischer’s case, he talks about the training programs for Iraqi heritage professionals at the British Museum who then go back and use this new knowledge to salvage heritage destroyed by ISIS. Kurin responds to Fischer’s remarks with an example of the Smithsonian’s involvement with the Louvre in recovering the Mosul Museum. What neither of them mention in their altruistic anecdotes is what the western institutions involved are getting in return for their ‘generosity’. With the Mosul Museum project, for example, a 480,000$ grant was awarded to the Louvre and Smithsonian for a “preparatory study” alone . In this way, just like their ancestors used the narrative of ‘civilising’ to justify the exploitation of their colonies for the metropole's own socio-economic and political benefit, so too are these national museums using a narrative of service to maintain a beneficial presence in the ‘developing world’. 

While some of Kurin’s comments made it seem like his intention was to acknowledge and remedy the blind spots of the institution, where it fell short for me was the lack of accountability as to why the problem existed in the first place. For example, when talking about the Smithsonian collection Kurin says: “we go into museums and see an art object, to somebody else it was religious.'' Pointing to the fact that to their original stakeholders these objects were more than aesthetically fetishised artefacts. At the same time, when talking about the benefits of the digital space, he also says, “we may get all sorts of ideas, of knowledge coming forth about things that we never imagined and learn more about our museum collections”. To me, the problem lay first in the lack of accountability for why these narratives were absent in the first place. They weren’t in hibernation all these years – they were deliberately silenced. Secondly, exacerbating the problem were ideas like Aguerre’s who saw the imperial actions of the 19th century as being symbolic of a “desire to democratise access to culture” that showed a “shared sense of preservation”. The panellists’ lack of acknowledgement of these realities combined with their reinterpreting painful episodes of history as mutually consensual, made me feel like they were positioning themselves as heroes in solving a problem they, and those part of this system before them, had themselves created. If an arsonist helps to put out a fire they themselves created we do not pat them on the back and say thank you – we make them take accountability for starting the fire in the first place, and then we stop them from making more fires.

Kurin’s comments also felt like he was treating change as something that happens to the institution as opposed to something the institution actively does itself. Crowdsourcing BIPoC communities for more cohesive narratives for their institution’s objects would be far less problematic had they paired it with institutional anti-white-supremacy work. That way both sides of the equation would be working towards a more fair and equitable future. But in being passive agents in this chapter of change they end up exploiting BIPoC communities for their emotional and intellectual labour. This is especially problematic when you consider that it is despite colonialism’s attempts at cultural erasure that these narratives exist today. In mining former colonies for these survived stories, without dismantling institutional white supremacy, these former (and present) colonial powers are in effect attempting to appropriate and make money off of BIPoC resistance. 

When it comes to institutional change this lack of accountability and passivity is harmful because it contributes to a system that allows objects from the periphery to have more agency, rights, and capabilities for movement than people from the peripheral world. The people being asked to “develop narratives” around these institution’s collections are also the ones who are painted as being not good enough, not safe enough, and not trustworthy enough by the institution’s respective governments’ xenophobic politics. The same cultures, belief systems, and alternate ways-of-knowing that Kurin and Fischer want to mine to give meaning to their collections are the ones that are considered threatening within their respective state’s borders. This xenophobic attitude, which exists in part because of the whitewashing of history, makes me feel like I, and communities like mine, only exist to museums insofar as we can drive up the value of the objects in their possession, albeit, without entering the developed world’s borders.

Their lack of accountability and reinterpretation of history also becomes an issue, since it is these same institutions that will have complete control over what kind of narratives contextualise the objects on the platform. While some of the panellists paint a rosy picture about the possibilities for “co-production of knowledge” on the platform, they don’t address how they will handle the narratives of trauma and violence associated with these objects – narratives they have deliberately whitewashed from their histories of these objects thus far. There is an incredible amount of pain and trauma that exists locally in relation to these dispossessed and dislocated objects. To have these narratives censored or derailed again would be another form of abuse. To have these memories treated as equal to, and forced to “coexist” with, whitewashed narratives of colonial violence would be re-traumatising and it opens up another avenue for the continued gaslighting of those on the short end of this transaction. You can see this happening in the way that Fischer and Aguerre refer to Alfred Maudslay and Henry Cole as pioneers when both were intruders and their “circulation of objects”, a form of theft! You can also see it in Aguerre’s comments about digital technologies giving people “a say on their heritage that previously they may have felt they didn’t have access to”. The “felt” implies that access was available all along and any thought to the contrary was just a personal misunderstanding. It completely erases the very real, unjust, and humiliating realities non-Euro Americans have to face because of their nationalities. The BIPoC stories being told around the taking down of colonial statues is a very tangible example of how this heritage strategy does so much harm in the long run. We can clearly see how the silenced pain associated with intergenerational memories of trauma being made to “co-exist” and treated as equal to the memories of the traumatiser is finally coming to a head. The toppling of statues is very much a reckoning. 

The digital divide 

Another problematic theme of the discussion was the constant downplaying of the very real repercussions of the digital divide by all panellists except for Bonnie Greer, who also happened to be the only person of colour on the panel. Greer repeatedly brought up that not everyone would be able to benefit from the new opportunities provided by digitized objects. She cautioned that museums had an obligation to not only avoid contributing to the divide but also to “bridge that divide” or risk becoming “irrelevant”. Three out of five times that Greer brought up the need to address the divide. Each time, Fischer followed up to dismiss and distract from the very valid point she makes and then circled the discussion back to the preferred narrative. At one-point, Kurin followed up from Fischer’s dismissive tangent with his own “there are divides all over the place” and then circled back to the narrative of the digital as “a hope”. Since the digital divide is also coloured it is important to break down what their dismissal of it as a nuisance means.

For me, one of the things it reinforced was that the museum was still an institution geared towards the elite and the Haves as opposed to the Have-Nots. In dismissing the divide, they are perpetuating a system where only the privileged can access resources that are the right of all. For example, Kurin mentions that the contents of the Smithsonian would be available around the world to “scientists and scholars”. A benevolent thought until you take into consideration that structural racism makes it so that the playing field to become a ‘scientist and scholar’ is in and of itself not level. Reni Eddo-Lodge breaks this down in chapter two of her book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race and explains, step by step, how the system is designed to hinder Black people in Britain. In ignoring the digital divide, the museum is prioritising white knowledge and perpetuating a system where the universal and the status quo is white. It also perpetuates a system where white people are the only ones in positions that allow them to speak about and for objects that belong to BIPoC communities’. This is why ideas like Aguerre’s “be mindful of the divide but embrace the possibilities that come for co-curation as well” ring hollow and tokenistic. 

The digital divide is not just a global phenomenon but also exists in the origin countries of the artefacts and it risks casting historical objects in a framework that is as problematic as colonialism itself. Take India for example where the digital divide is focused not only on class lines but on caste lines as well. If this platform were to be used here those with digital access would probably be of higher caste and classes and thus from the privileged strata of Indian society. The ethnic groups whose voices are already marginalised in their national discourse will be silenced again on the international scale. This means that anyone who wishes to study these objects would be getting only one side of the story, and because they are ignorant of the intra-national cultural nuances, they would assume that what they are getting is the only story. In dismissing the implications of the digital divide and cultural nuances outside their borders, the panelists’ who dismiss the digital divide are ignoring the fact that the only people who would be able to access and interact with their platform would be those who have learned the language of India’s colonizer. English is not the medium of education for all. The panelists’ ignorance of this reality in the context of their proposed platform contributes to and facilitates on a cultural level an already authoritarian and discriminatory form of politics on the subcontinent. 

Conclusion

Shifting the focus from intention to impact is now more important than ever. Aguerre, Fischer, and Kurin’s comments are symptomatic of something bigger, that is, the inability of their states and their institutions to take accountability for their past and present actions. As most Euro-American citizens are unaware of their nation’s histories in the peripheral world, they are unable to understand the historic reasons for the south to north migrations. This ignorance is exploited by right-wing politics to create very hostile environments for BIPoC communities who have very legitimate historic reasons for migrating to the Global North. If these institutions are going to move forward more mindfully and in a way that prioritizes impact over intent, they will need to stop centering whiteness in negotiating what the parameters for equality look like. They will have to stop appropriating vocabulary of social justice movements to sell their public a watered-down and self-centred version of “cooperation” and “equality”. 

The truth of the matter is this – we don’t need you to give us access to our own heritage (that is our right) and we certainly don’t need you to give us voices – we have our own! We need you to stop silencing us by prioritising your own intentions over the actual impact of your actions and instead listen to things we have been saying all along. If you are still feeling so compelled by the spirit of giving then maybe give us our heritage back. If not, just stop taking!