Since its inception, Material World has treated museums and archives not only as repositories of material culture, but as material culture–that is, material products as well as producers of culture and social memory. As institutions, they are sites of collection and exhibition, acts that have their own material and materializing dimensions.
Here are some of our favorite posts about museums, exhibitions, archives, and memorials:
Graeme Were reviews the Musée du Quai Branly a year after it opened.
Anna Weinrich examines two permanent museum exhibitions in Australia featuring Aboriginal culture and collections by a foundational anthropologist, testing out the new museology against the politics of Aboriginal voice.
Diana Young discusses her curatorial efforts to enliven museum collections in dialogue with Aboriginal artists.
Bethany Edmunds reviews two British exhibitions of Pacific material, reflecting on the role of language in framing both historic and contemporary art and material culture.
Gabriela Nicolescu writes about the aesthetics and ideologies behind changing representation of peasant culture in the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant.
The History Rising project brings together artist and curator to explore the architecture and design of exhibition space, technology, and furniture.
Paul Williams investigates the global trend for museums memorializing atrocities.
In one of the innovative formats on Material World, a conference report details the papers given in a conference called “Disturbing Pasts: Memories, Controversies, and Creativity.”
Matt Voigts discusses London’s vernacular “Ghost bikes” in the context of other urban memorials.
Anna Haverinen explores virtual memorials as means of mourning online.
Christopher Pinney writes about the salvaging of an individual’s photographic archive after monsoon flooding.
Corinne Kratz shares a link to an online archive of publications by Ivan Karp, one of our most prolific and insightful anthropologists of museums and exhibition practice.
And finally, I include one of my own book reviews to call further attention to Museum Pieces, the important 2011 publication by Ruth Phillips that brings togethers essays from her entire career working in and thinking critically about museums.
2014-07-15