Contextual Temporalities: Time and space in museums, galleries and archives

This session focuses on the ways in which museums, galleries, and archives have constructed multiple temporalities through configuring relationships between objects and space in permanent and temporary displays.

As tools of Enlightenment thinking, these institutions created and visualised taxonomies of art and nature. They scripted narratives around nationhood, schools, and periods, and visualised the construction of emerging disciplines such as art history, anthropology, and natural history. In short, they transformed time into history. Subsequently, the white cube offered galleries which supplanted time with space. Postmodernity then engaged with the museum as ‘time machine’, frequently reframing the architectural envelope in playful and imaginative ways. As humanity faces the consequences of the climate catastrophe and contemplates the possibility of its own extinction, our sense of writing histories has become precarious and urgent. How do our cultural institutions reconfigure our awareness of time and space?

The session invites contributions that consider the engagement of museums, galleries, and archives with time and history. It welcomes proposals that interrogate questions of canon formation and engage with transhistorical dialogues and spatial constructions of temporality. We will consider the precarity of the present and ask what role museums and other cultural institutions will play in the future.

Session Convenor:

Michaela Giebelhausen, University of Birmingham

Speakers:

Archisman Sarker, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

Colonial pasts, timeless frames: Deconstructing temporalities in South Asian art display at the Rijksmuseum and British Museum

This paper argues that the spatial and temporal configurations within the Asian Pavilion at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the South Asian Gallery at the British Museum in London construct selective temporalities that shape visitor perceptions of South Asian art and antiquities. Both institutions, while situated within European contexts, showcase pre-modern South Asian artefacts that underscore a curated “timeless” aesthetic. However, their histories of collecting differ significantly: the Rijksmuseum’s South Asian holdings largely emerged from societies such as the Royal Asian Art Society in the Netherlands, reflecting a more “scientific” yet Eurocentric enthusiasm for Asian art, while the British Museum’s acquisitions bear overt colonial and antiquarian associations. These spaces align with a museological logic that prioritises European temporal frameworks, often suggesting an unchanging or static quality to South Asian artistic heritage. This paper examines how the layout, lighting, labelling, and spatial arrangement within these galleries serve to “other” these objects, constructing a temporality that exists outside Western modernity. Such display strategies cater to a contemporary, predominantly Western audience, reinforcing colonial-era tropes of South Asia. In critiquing these practices, this paper highlights how the embedded “timelessness” dislocates these artworks from South Asia’s evolving historical and sociopolitical contexts, impacting the modern viewer’s reception and understanding. By juxtaposing these spaces, the paper calls for a rethinking of display methodologies to challenge Eurocentric temporal constructs, advocating for a more contextually nuanced approach that acknowledges the continuous, lived histories of South Asia’s artistic legacy within global art history frameworks.

Olaya Sanfuentes, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Contact (of times and spaces). The exhibition of textiles at the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino

In December of this year, an exhibition of archaeological, colonial and ethnographic Andean textiles will be inaugurated at the Chile’s Pre-Colombian Art Museum. The highlight of the exhibition are colonial tapestries from the viceroyalty of Peru. As the curator, and along with the co-curator Nilda Callañaupa, a quechua weaver from Cusco, we have chosen the concept of Contact to name and articulate the exhibition. The study of these textiles reveals contact among materials, traditions, technologies, actors, iconographies and uses. Contact among contrasting times and spaces materialize in them as well.

Textiles from different eras and geographies come into contact and go beyond the limits of space and time, presenting a set of complex realities on which we can reflect. With this strategy in mind, the indigenous world is not relegated to the past; it is included in the contemporary understanding and narratives about the pieces, and it endures in them through memory.

These interactions lead us to reflect on two historical-geographical concepts that contextualize the objects and propose an interpretation of them. The first of these is heterochronies and the second is cultural geography.

Through this exhibition, we hope to offer alternatives to the Western linear concept of time and entertain other ways of thinking about and materializing time. We are interested in including other ways of looking at time and space, variables that have been appropriated by Europe and Western Christian culture, which often ignores the contributions of other cultures, as the author Jack Goody argues in his book “The Theft of History”.

Clarissa Ricci, Università di Bologna

Against Precarity: Politics of Contemplation and Social Media

Rethinking the temporality of museum narratives and displays has been a challenge for most museums in postcolonial and global times. Often, the flexibility of re-hanging has served as one of the first options to reorganise narratives and museum spaces. Together with restitutions, a recent challenge was, in particular, offered by the increased use of social media by museums after the pandemic. How doesthe use of social media challenge the time and space of a museum?

This paper will dissect the specific case of the Rijksmuseum, which has strategically leveraged social media to reshape its narrative and spatial design. By analysing a series of exhibitions held between 2022 and 2024, the study aims to highlight how the museum’s use of social media has driven a significant shift in its spatial and temporal narratives.

In particular, the analysis of the Vermeer exhibition shows how the use of social media helped the museum to design a more complex experience that delegates to the digital realm education, information, and an in-depth understanding of a specific temporality and exclusively allows an exclusive, unmediated encounter with the art in the galleries spaces. This example can be viewed as a new trend in re-establishing the contemplation experience, moving the temporality of narratives in the background and underlying the presentness of the viewer, resisting concepts of precarity with a broader understaffing of the ecologies of time and space in the XXI century.

Xingchen Lin, University of Wales Trinity Saint David

From Historical Narratives to Present Engagement: A Museum Education Framework for the Chinese Diaspora Communities

This paper examines a museum education framework aimed at enhancing community engagement within Chinese diaspora communities by connecting immigrant histories to contemporary experiences. Focusing on the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) as a representative example, this study investigates how Chinese diaspora museums employ historical narratives to foster cultural identity and a sense of belonging. Through initiatives such as oral history archives, travelling exhibitions, and participatory workshops, MOCA demonstrates how museums can transform immigrant stories into dynamic, present-day engagements. Employing a mixed-methods approach—including case studies, interviews, and participatory observations—this study identifies strategies that prioritise audience participation and integrate historical narratives into modern contexts. An analysis of MOCA’s practices illustrates the potential of museums to create inclusive spaces that preserve cultural heritage while actively involving communities in shaping and reinterpreting their histories. Ultimately, this study positions museums as ‘temporal bridges’, weaving immigrant stories across time to strengthen cohesion and identity within Chinese diaspora communities. The study underscores the role of museums as active agents in social change, advocating for an inclusive, interactive approach to cultural education that resonates across time and space.

Alexandra Moschovi, University of Sunderland

Re-imag(in)ing the past and envisioning the future of photographic heritage

Photography entered museums shortly after its invention in the nineteenth century, primarily as a reproduction technology and a scientific tool, rather than a creative medium. It provided realistic representations of the world, of art and architecture, of science and technology, of faraway lands and people, which would furnish museums’ galleries, libraries, and archives. In his 1940s treatise Museé Imaginaire (Museum Without Walls), André Malraux addressed photography as a tool for reproduction and “metamorphosis”. Photography, Malraux argued, redefined art history, “imposing a new hierarchy” by changing how objects were perceived, even providing ancient relics with “a quite startling, if spurious modernism” (1953/1978, 27). Viewing the museum as a “time machine” that blends temporalities, narratives, memories, and future possibilities, where time and space are both compressed and expanded, photography emerges as a unique medium for mediating past, present, and future as well as notions of space and place. This paper will examine these complex dynamics using the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Photography Centre as a case study. Combining the museum’s photographic collections, which date back to the South Kensington Museum’s establishment in the mid-19th century, with those of the Royal Photographic Society and contemporary collection-based commissions, the Centre’s permanent transhistorical displays showcase how photographic heritage and histories can be re-imagined bridging historical and contemporary perspectives and blurring the boundaries between photographic genres, analogue and digital media, and materialities.

Nicola Foster, University of Suffolk

A Future for the Past? the Problem of History as a Temporal Narrative

Kunsthaus Zurich holds a collection covering over 800 years. Historically, collections were displayed chronologically to demonstrate the progress of art. The display under the title of ‘Old Masters’ at the Kunsthaus, and many museums, is chronologically displayed. Boris Groys notes that recently, artists and curators have been making efforts ‘to be free at last from the burden of history’. In 2021 the Kunsthaus opened an extension to exhibit works differently. The works were mostly modern – Impressionist, Expressionist, and Abstract works – on loan to the museum from major collectors. By exhibiting these works under their collector, they did not ‘overcome time’ but constructed a different timeline: that of the history of the collection.

Alongside the permanent collection, which is mostly chronologically displayed as the history of art, are the temporary exhibitions of specific collections, as the history of collections. The Kunsthaus is currently also exhibiting yet another temporary exhibition under the title: A Future for the Past: The Bührle Collection: art, context, war and conflict. The Emil Bührle Collection proved highly controversial: many of the works were acquired from Jewish collectors who were forced to give up their collections by the Nazis. This exhibition introduced yet another timeline of historical acquisition, and together all the displays form yet another historical narrative, that of the history of exhibitions. The paper will explore the question posed by Groys: does the problem of history lie in the assumption that ‘the new’ is a product of history?