Museums are more relevant than ever today

For museums to be truly inclusive, decolonised and spaces of education and research requires a rethinking of power relations and learning from past lessons.

The British Museum has been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. The theft of several museum displays by a former curator has opened up a broader conversation on cultural theft, ownership, reparation and setting right historical wrongs.

At its centre is the ethical question of how the museum gathered its wealth of artefacts — a sordid history of empire. This question gets revisited whenever formerly colonised countries demand the repatriation  of cultural artefacts forcibly removed by their colonisers.

International Museum Day on May 18 presents an opportunity for a societal health check by examining how museums engage with history, including their own chequered pasts, changing socio-political contexts and increasing demands for recognition by historically silenced communities.

It is common for people to visit museums in other countries to understand their history and culture. As social institutions that authorise cultural meaning, museums tell particular stories and leave out others. This also imbues them with political meaning. They serve as a method of soft power through control over the acquisition, curation, display and movement of objects between countries.

Museums are doing their bit to resuscitate their traditionally staid image in the public imagination. With a crop of new museums coming up across the world and with private funding and investment, they are being heralded as laboratories of ideas.

The COVID-19 pandemic popularised virtual museum tours across the world. Suddenly, culture and history became more accessible. Digitisation has also changed the relationship of the viewer with the objects on view. But such new forms of access produce their own logic of gatekeeping on the kinds of stories that get told, even as global cultures become more accessible.

For museums to be truly inclusive and decolonised and true spaces of education and research for future generations requires a rethinking of power relations and learning from past lessons.

On International Museums Day, 360info invited academics to examine how museums are responding to this call for inclusion and recognition of historical wrongs going forward.