Abstract
This thesis examines how museum visitors interact with contemporary exhibitions that represent colonial histories. It illustrates how, through their encounters with museum exhibitions, visitors engage with the colonial past. It considers how and to what extent the form and content of those exhibitions mediate how visitors engage with the colonial past.How visitors engage with exhibitions is an underdeveloped area of research in the field of museum studies but there is a pressing need for it. Visitor research can highlight the significance of exhibitions in terms of their effect on the people who engage with them, rather than focusing on their form and content in isolation. It also provides a way to test claims made within museum studies and practice regarding the impact and efficacy of specific curatorial approaches.
Visitor research is perhaps especially needed in relation to exhibitions within European museums that represent colonial histories. In recent years, many museums across Europe have sought to engage with histories of European colonialism more critically. As a result, there has been a proliferation of exhibitions that have prominently and explicitly presented colonial histories. This period of experimentation has begun to be evaluated within museum studies (seevan Huis 2019; Anderson 2020; Sieg 2021) but visitor research has not yet been utilised to do so. As such, there are significant gaps in our understanding of the impact of these exhibitions and the curatorial approaches that they adopt.
This thesis evaluates two examples of such exhibitions: ‘Voices from the Colonies’ at the National Museum of Denmark and the ‘South Asia Gallery’ at the British Museum. Its conclusions stem from undertaking ethnographic walking interviews with six members of the public, which are supplemented with static semi-structured interviews. Together, these methods shed light on how visitors engage with the colonial past before, during, and after their visit to an exhibition in depth and with specificity.
This thesis finds that across both case-study exhibitions, all participants brought with them their own closely felt modes of engaging with the colonial past that they mobilised within the exhibitions. By mobilising them, they ultimately reinforced their own modes of engaging with the colonial past, be they critical or uncritical. This thesis draws upon scholarship within memory studies to illustrate how each participant engages with the colonial past. It contributes2to this scholarship by showing how and why individuals mobilise these modes of engagement when they encounter museum exhibitions.
This thesis argues that the form and content of these exhibitions did nonetheless have a significant impact on participants. It shows that case-study exhibitions did bring about a range of changes – some subtle, some more overt – to how participants engaged with the colonial past. These forms of mediation, and the ways in which participants engaged with the colonial past as a result, rarely aligned with the intentions or hopes of the exhibition makers. This thesis concludes by considering the implications of these findings for museum studies and practice.
| Date of Award | Jul 2024 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
|
| Supervisor | Claire Wintle (Supervisor) & Eliza Tan (Supervisor) |