Towards an Inclusive Museology in Material Culture Museums by Jecu, Marta;

Short description:

"

This volume focuses on artistic practices that have recently been developed in material culture museums with the aim of rethinking historic collections. It will be of interest to scholars working in contemporary art and practice, art history, museum studies, and heritage studies.

Long description:

This volume explores contemporary artistic practices developed in material culture museums to reimagine historic collections. It begins by examining the influence of conceptual art within art museums and the transformative impact it has had on museology. Specifically, it highlights how conceptual art's institutional critique, initially rooted in the art world, has been adopted and adapted by other areas of museology.

The contributions collected in this volume span various timelines: they consider historic conceptualism and its influence in the art or ethnographic museum; recent North–South/East–West decolonial practices, with a focus on practices developed on the African continent; post-digital conceptual practices that are problematising heritage and locality; and performative and activist conceptual practices. At the same time, some of the contributions gathered in this volume express a timely critique of artistic interventions in museums, which turn out to be formal solutions that maintain a hegemonic vision on history.

The chapters examine conceptual art in the development of new solutions for socially engaged and decolonising museological practices. The first part considers artistic actions conceived as a response to the history of art and the art institution and explores their intended repercussions in social space and other branches of museology. The second part shifts the perspective from the art museum to ethnology, history, and natural history museums. The final part explores an emerging vision of the museum as a socially and ecologically just, virtual, or concrete space of action and discourse, advocating its affinity with recent innovative trans-disciplinary, post-conceptual, and performative art practices.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in contemporary art and practice, art history, museum studies, and heritage studies.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Conceptual Art as Method Part 1: Inside the Art Museum: Rethinking Museology 1. Imagine! Reveal! Invade! How 1970s Performance Art Contributed to a Critical Museology 2. Art and Social Agency in a State of (Post)Transition 3. Disruption at Work: Brook Andrew Inside the Museum 4. Curatorial Practice as Conceptual Art: The Rijksmuseum’s Slavery (2021) & The Fitzwilliam Museum’s Black Atlantic: Power, People, resistance (2023 & 2025) Part 2: Inside the Material Culture Museum: Conceptual Art in a Sociomuseological Perspective 5. Building the School of Thought of Sociomuseology: Paths Taken and Challenges 6. Beyond the Colonial Canon at the Musée de l’Homme, Paris. Yto Barrada Reads Thérèse Rivière’s Archives 7. Innovation and Renovation at the Afrikamuseum, Tervuren (A Conversation with Christine Bluard) 8. Re-embodying Museum Objects: Rosanna Raymond’s Acti.VĀ.tions and the Question of the Object in New Museology 9. Artist Intervention, by its Very Definition, Cannot Dismantle the Master’s House Part 3: Conceptualism and a Future-oriented Museum 10. Dialogues with Museums in Angola and Beyond (A Conversation with Paula Nascimento) 11. The Metabolic Museum–University (MM–U) and Other Projects (A Conversation with Clémentine Deliss) 12. Home Museum: Challenging Western Museological Practices Through Inclusive Participation in Lagos, Nigeria 13. Museums in Tension: Critical Encounters and Insurgent Practices 14. Museums and Climate: From Institutional Critique to the Ecosocial Museum 15. Curating as open process: constructing conversations between political ecology and artistic research that shift institutional practices