The Activist Museum, a New ‘Identity’ Through Language?

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the ‘new’ identity of the Activist Museum and how this is a useful progression in the development of fairer co-curatorial practices that can rearticulate a multifaceted world drawing on ‘transformation’. Transparency in these processes would mean museums letting go of a certain power over knowledge. They would need to [re]position themselves as a resource, a facility that has a specialist knowledge to share. At present this sharing is conditional, not transparent, and still rife with ‘invisible power’ (Lynch, 2011). However, the agency ‘Activist’ gives the museum a space they can move within. This chapter will gently introduce how this happens whilst presenting two key theoretical premises: bell hooks’ notion of radical openness and Michel Foucault’s thinking on institutional power. hooks talks of these institutional cultural spaces ‘as spaces of silence’ where ‘oppressive boundaries set by race, sex and class domination persist’ (hooks, b. (1989). Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 36, 15–23. JSTOR.). Before embarking on the deep theoretical frameworks of Part Two of this book, this chapter begins to identify the nuts and bolts of why non-selective curation is critical turn.