For this exhibition, my co-curator Catherine Flood and I were keen to borrow objects directly from activist groups around the world.
Activist social movements have an ongoing history of being misrepresented not just by the mass media and liberal academia but in the recent vogue for broadly activist-themed exhibitions, such as the 2009 Istanbul Biennale and the 2012 Berlin Biennale.
As a result, many of these groups were suspicious of lending to a large museum and allowing it to represent them, so we set up a series of workshops drawing on the methods of Participatory Action Research, a social science approach intended to make research more just.
The intent is to do research with – rather than on – communities: they should collectively set the research questions that are to be asked and they, not the institution, should reap the benefits of that research.
Adapting this approach to participation in curation and public history has some precedents in the work of curatorial/art collectives such as Group Material, the work of Jorge Ribalta and others with movements in and around Macba in Barcelona, or in attempts to engage more sensitively with indigenous cultures in Australian and New Zealand museums.
Through a series of sometimes difficult discussions, curators and movement participants consensually established the themes, messages and questions of the exhibition, and later also – working with the designers – its physical design.
For example, labels by curators are accompanied by a more visible text written by the makers or users of each object, saying whatever they wish about it.
There are also takeaway “how to” guides that show how to make many of the objects in the exhibition.
Gavin Grindon is the co-curator of Disobedient Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The exhibition runs until 1 February 2015
Activist social movements have an ongoing history of being misrepresented not just by the mass media and liberal academia but in the recent vogue for broadly activist-themed exhibitions, such as the 2009 Istanbul Biennale and the 2012 Berlin Biennale.
As a result, many of these groups were suspicious of lending to a large museum and allowing it to represent them, so we set up a series of workshops drawing on the methods of Participatory Action Research, a social science approach intended to make research more just.
The intent is to do research with – rather than on – communities: they should collectively set the research questions that are to be asked and they, not the institution, should reap the benefits of that research.
Adapting this approach to participation in curation and public history has some precedents in the work of curatorial/art collectives such as Group Material, the work of Jorge Ribalta and others with movements in and around Macba in Barcelona, or in attempts to engage more sensitively with indigenous cultures in Australian and New Zealand museums.
Through a series of sometimes difficult discussions, curators and movement participants consensually established the themes, messages and questions of the exhibition, and later also – working with the designers – its physical design.
For example, labels by curators are accompanied by a more visible text written by the makers or users of each object, saying whatever they wish about it.
There are also takeaway “how to” guides that show how to make many of the objects in the exhibition.
Gavin Grindon is the co-curator of Disobedient Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The exhibition runs until 1 February 2015
