SESSION: The Contemporary Turn in Historical Collections: Postcolonial Geographies

Cross-pollination of contemporary artworks and museum historical collections has become standard, especially since the 1970-80s, when institutional critique was heralded by Fred Wilson, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser, and others. Hybridized installations may fall into what Clare Bishop has described as “museums draw[ing] upon the widest range of artefacts to situate art’s relationship to particular histories with universal relevance.” Such installations often address objects’ colonial origins, but using contemporary strategies in their display is not a panacea.

An emergent question about this turn is how it is expressed based on museums’ geographies. At a fall 2025 workshop at Vanderbilt University, Positioning the Contemporary in University Historical Collections, curators from university museums in the UK, US, and Ireland shared perspectives from the vantage point of our peer network. This panel will convene a new cohort to probe the question of museum geographies further. Is there a difference in how museums networked globally but shaped by varied intellectual/artistic heritages (and sectors) implement such integrations? Is there a schism between how museums in and outside of the US pursue institutional critique via the contemporary?

Session Convenors:

Amanda H. Hellman, Palmer Museum of Art, Penn State University

Rachel P. Kreiter, Vanderbilt University Museum of Art

Session Speakers:

Carolina Teixeira Sousa, University of Porto

(Re)Interpreting the (Dis)appeared: A Methodological Approach to the Documental Archive of the Museum of Ethnology of Porto

The digitisation of inactive archives constitutes a strategic response to their inherent fragility, functioning simultaneously as a mechanism of safeguarding — through preservation — and democratisation, through public accessibility to heritage that is, in part, at risk. This paper presents the process of recovery and digitisation of the documentary archive of the Museum of Ethnology of Porto (MEP, 1945–1994) — currently under the custody of Património Cultural, I.P. (PCIP) — an institution that has materially disappeared, whose history remains largely unknown.

Based on a methodological model developed within the doctoral research project, the study outlines the stages of assessment, digitisation and metadata creation, integrating international standards such as ISAAR-CPF, ISAD(G) and PREMIS, as well as FAIR principles of digital preservation. This technical process is interpreted not merely as an act of conservation but as a contemporary curatorial practice: the creation of new contexts for interpretation, interoperability and public access.

The digitisation of the MEP demonstrates that technology, when guided by archival and ethical principles, can operate as an instrument of museological reactivation. By making “forgotten” archives visible, it fosters a renewed relationship between archive, public and territory, contributing to a critical and postcolonial museology grounded in transparency and digital participation.

Alice Stevenson, UCL Institute of Archaeology

Contemporizing Antiquities

Both in the UK and the US contemporary artistic interventions in museum collections have appeared with increasing frequency in the last decade. Indeed, so frequent are these interventions that rhetoric proclaiming that these provide a refreshing ‘dialogue between past and present’ is becoming tired and superficial. I would further argue, however, that more recent commercial market presentations that have equally adopted a mix of the contemporary and the historic or ancient, are not just tired and superficial, but increasingly undermining the use of these practices for decolonization and institutional critique in museums. I will use some case studies that examine recent trends towards a mixed art market that is deliberately juxtaposing antiquities and contemporary art as a sales strategy and how this is influenced by or influencing public exhibitionary practices.

Jakub Gawkowski, Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź / Central European University in Vienna

Operation of the Eye: Re-seeing the Collection at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź

This presentation examines Ways of Seeing, the current modern and contemporary art collection exhibition at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź (2025), to reconsider how historical avant-garde collections can be reinterpreted through contemporary critical frameworks from a Central-Eastern European perspective. It asks: how can a museum mobilise its own institutional memory to produce new modes of seeing, rather than simply update existing narratives?

Grounded in the theoretical intersection between John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and Władysław Strzemiński’s Theory of Seeing, the study combines close analysis of curatorial strategies with archival research into the museum’s collection histories. These texts, emerging from distinct geopolitical contexts yet united by the claim that vision is historically conditioned, provide the conceptual basis for examining display as an active epistemic operation.

The exhibition reorganises the museum’s nearly 100-year-old collection into thirteen thematic constellations, each titled after a work in the collection. This approach foregrounds friction and plurality: avant-garde paradigms enter dialogue with feminist and queer perspectives; visibility and emancipation intersect with self-representation and disappearance; abstraction and figuration function as parallel political languages. Archival “time-capsules” anchor these dialogues within key institutional moments, from the 1948 Neoplastic Room to post-1989 transformations.

Rooted in a post-socialist, post-industrial urban context marked by rupture and uneven modernisation, Ways of Seeing challenges dominant models of collection display by foregrounding institutional memory and regional specificity as productive critical tools. The paper argues that re-seeing the collection becomes a generative curatorial method, offering a model for how museums might construct new constellations to envision alternative cultural and political futures.