Q&A | ‘Museums need to move beyond treating exhibitions as isolated historical events’ 

In 1904, Bradford’s Great Exhibition included a staged Somali Village in which 57 people from British Somaliland were put on display to the viewing public. The attraction drew hundreds of thousands of paying visitors, and profits from the exhibition helped fund the art collection at Cartwright Hall, the municipal art gallery and museum that opened that year. 

More than a century later, guest curators Abira Hussein and Yahya Birt have revisited this history in A Somali Village in Lister Park: Weaving Together Industry, Culture and Empire (on until 1 November), an exhibition at Cartwright Hall that explored the connections between Bradford’s textile industry, imperial power and the representation of Somali people.  

Developed in partnership with Somali-led organisations with reference to archival material, archaeological research and diasporic knowledge, the exhibition examines how colonial narratives were constructed and how they might be challenged today. 

The project was named Cultural Knowledge Exchange Project of the Year at the 2026 Future Icons of Culture Knowledge Exchange Awards, organised by the National Centre for Academic and Cultural Exchange (NCACE).  

Museums Journal sat down with Hussein and Birt to discuss the exhibition’s development and what museums can do to address the continuing legacy of colonial museum practices. 

Can you tell us a little more about the 1904 Somali Village exhibition? 

Abira Hussein and Yahya Birt: Bradford’s Great Exhibition of 1904 was held between May and October in Lister Park. Like similar exhibitions in Europe and America, it was a mix of culture, industry, science and entertainment interlaced with imperial themes. It was chiefly designed to boost Bradford as a great centre of the textile industry, given fears about rising American tariffs and increased foreign competition. Some 2.4 million people attended. 

For an additional fee of sixpence, 348,550 people gained entrance to what was described as “the most popular of ‘the entertainments’”: a staged ethnographic village within the exhibition grounds. The village housed 57 Somalis from British Somaliland – 27 children, 19 men and 11 women – and generated gross receipts of £8,216. 

In addition, the new purpose-built municipal art gallery and museum, Cartwright Hall, was inaugurated, and two-thirds of the Great Exhibition profits, including those from the ethnographic village, were used to pay for its art collection. 

How was the original village presented and how did it reflect the views and racial hierarchies of the period? 

Drawing upon the German Völkerschau (people show) model of a staged native village, the Viennese impresario Victor Bamberger (1864–1937) presented the Somali Village as both “authentic” and exotic. This form arose in the late nineteenth century as European audiences grew sceptical of the genuineness of native peoples shown at theatres and circuses. Yet performance, real life and cultural knowledge remained tightly interwoven in this new form. 

The core elements were what Eric Ames calls “the world of work”, in the form of a market; everyday life, in terms of schooling, cooking and praying; the performance of song, dance and mock fights; and real-life events, such as a divorce, a death, a birth and a fire in 1904, which were turned into marketing opportunities in close collaboration with the local press. 

Advanced power looms in the Industrial Hall were deliberately juxtaposed with the “primitive” Somali handloom in the village. The latter was compared with Britain’s pre-industrial past, placing it within a developmental, hierarchical schema. The villagers were recruited in the midst of the Anglo-Somali Wars and presented as good imperial subjects, in contrast to those who resisted British territorial expansion. Bamberger’s ethnographic booklet, which we feature as a tactile object, is imperialist, Orientalist and sexualised. 

What impact did the original exhibition have among the public in Bradford? 

The Somali Village drew large crowds: combining concessions with paying visitors, attendance averaged 2,300 daily, six days a week. Blanket local press coverage, marked by curiosity, mockery, paternalism and racialisation, reflected sustained public fascination. 

Early on, council debate about cold weather prompted the public to donate blankets and clothes, visible in May 1904 photographs. Printing, the second-largest industry in Edwardian Bradford after textiles, was central to how Somalis and other colonised peoples were represented via the new postcard medium. Bradford’s Somali Village postcards circulated across Europe for years, sometimes relabelled as “Abyssinians” for later tours. 

One exhibited postcard shows textile magnate Lord Masham (1815–1906), Cartwright Hall’s benefactor, leading a delegation to the village. This links the exhibition’s themes of industry, culture and empire in a single moment, showing how the white gaze was trained on the “primitive other”. Counterpointing this are six Ernest Aris (1882–1963) cartoon postcards satirically domesticating the Somalis within local class antagonisms, using Yorkshire-dialect captions. 

How did you approach this subject from the lens of a modern curator?  

From a contemporary curatorial perspective, partnership was central to our approach. We worked with cultural institutions in Bradford and with Somali-led organisations, including Somali Village Charity, Culture House and Koor Archives, recognising that institutional research alone could not account for histories that had been fragmented or excluded. 

We also drew on Sara Ahmed’s concept of orientation, asking not only what the 1904 exhibition displayed but also how it positioned visitors and directed their attention. The original exhibition organised movement and perception in ways that allowed the white visitor to move freely as an observer, while Somali participants were fixed within a racialised frame of display. Our curatorial process therefore involved both reorientation and remediation. 

This meant bringing museum and archival material into relation with archaeological research and diasporic knowledge, so that the history could be encountered through more than the institutional record alone. Polyvocality shaped the exhibition form: archival images were placed alongside objects, while sound and film expanded the ways visitors could encounter the history. The design followed the same principle, drawing on Somali textile motifs and material culture so that the colonial archive did not determine the exhibition’s visual language. 

What did you want your 2026 exhibition to convey? 

One central mechanism we wanted to challenge was temporal fixing. The 1904 Village did not simply racialise Somali people; it placed them within what has been described as an anachronistic space, positioning Somali life as belonging to an earlier stage of social development.  

This was particularly powerful within an exhibition devoted to Bradford’s industrial modernity, where technological progress could be understood against the apparent primitiveness of the village. The contrast did not simply describe differences; it helped produce visitors’ own sense of being modern. 

Weaving Together Industry, Culture and Empire became the exhibition’s organising metaphor because it allowed us to reconnect histories that this temporal ordering had separated. Our approach to remediation was similarly relational; rather than treating museum objects as remnants of a distant culture, we brought them into relation with forms of knowledge that revealed continuing use and transmission. 

We were also interested in moments when Somali life exceeded the colonial frame itself. Performance, refusal, labour protest and everyday practice could not be completely contained by the meanings imposed upon the village. The exhibition therefore sought not to reconstruct a complete past, but to make visible both the structures that fix Somali people in time and the forms of life that continually unsettled that fixing. 

How does your exhibition explore the connection between the Somali Village and the building of Cartwright Hall? 

As curators, it was not only important for us to retrieve a story that had been largely forgotten but also to recontextualise it as fully as possible. When half-remembered, the Somali Village is dismissed as bizarre and picaresque. Instead, the exhibition centres the village’s deep connections to Edwardian Bradford’s industrial and cultural elites. 

Lord Masham, the textile manufacturer Samuel Cunliffe Lister, features heavily as the sponsor of Cartwright Hall, the city’s leading art gallery and museum, and is shown visiting the Somali Village. We explore the imperial connections Bradford’s industrialised wool trade had with settler colonialism in Australia through the expansion of mass sheep farming there. 

Cartwright Hall’s first director, Butler-Wood (1854–1934), and London art dealer W. H. Knight, who went on to manage the 1904 Exhibition, came up with the idea of a native village as “something more novel” to increase ticket sales. Both the Great Exhibition and the village were highly profitable. Two-thirds of the exhibition profits, along with accumulated interest, were used to fund Cartwright Hall’s art collection between 1906 and 1928. We feature Alfred Drury’s marble bust of Lister, which was purchased by the gallery in 1906, the year the exhibition profits became available. 

The idea of exhibiting people is quite shocking today. How does the new exhibition deal with this discomfort? 

We did not want to resolve that discomfort; the exhibition cannot undo the violence of colonial display, but it can expose the mechanisms that produced and circulated that violence. The photographs were not neutral records; they emerged from a moment of rapid technological change in photography and mass printing, when postcards and the illustrated press enabled racialised images to circulate on an unprecedented scale.

In Bradford, where printing was the second-largest industry after textiles, the Village became part of a wider visual economy in which staged encounters could be reproduced and consumed far beyond Lister Park. 

This made ethical seeing and circulation important to our approach. We used images selectively, limited our use of photographs of children and considered carefully how they would circulate online and in marketing. We reframed the images as products of an imperial visual system, not evidence of Somali life. 

At the same time, the archive contains moments of refusal, including a woman shielding her face from the camera. These moments interrupt the apparent authority of the image and remind us that those photographs were never simply visual types, but historical subjects who could contest the terms of their own visibility. 

What do you think the museum sector should be doing to address the legacy of these past practices? 

Museums need to move beyond treating exhibitions as isolated historical events. They should examine how classification and institutional translation continue to shape what becomes publicly knowable, and how this operates across museum collections and archives. 

This means recognising both institutional and disciplinary enclosure. Materials that once belonged to the same cultural world are dispersed across different systems of knowledge, where objects, photographs and archival records acquire separate institutional identities. Addressing that fragmentation requires working across those boundaries rather than assuming any one disciplinary record is complete. 

It also requires greater recognition of the limits of museum work itself. Christina Sharpe questions forms of memorialisation that appear to place historical violence safely in the past when its effects remain active in the present. Museums cannot resolve those histories through a redisplay or revised interpretation alone. 

The task is therefore not simply to reinterpret colonial material, but to question the structures through which it became knowable. It also means creating more relational ways for different forms of knowledge to remain in conversation and making this approach explicit in curatorial practice.