Shedding Light on the Museum

How can we – as museum visitors and community members – help museums be the institutions we want and need? And how can we engage critically with them in this moment of crisis, while they are closed?

Shedding Light on the Museum is an attempt to use this difficult moment to reclaim our museums and think them through, together with all of those whom they touch.

FestivALT has invited three multidisciplinary artists to engage with the museum and the difficult questions it raises. Together we reflect on the broad and pressing questions museums must face (Wiktor Podgórski), the layered hauntings in and implications of their collections (Dorota Mytych), and the ambivalence and urgency of this conversation (Jaqueline Nicholls). Building on prior work by scholar-activists Erica Lehrer (Canada) and Roma Sendyka (Poland), along with Kraków Ethnographic Museum (MEK) curator Magdalena Zych, we are projecting our concerns on and into the museum. Projection has opened new creative possibilities for catalyzing a public conversation. Our project has also unexpectedly intersected with the revolutionary movement that has emerged in Poland in recent weeks. Anger and pain about a wide range of social issues unavoidably intermingle with the museum-specific questions we raise – perhaps making more visible the ever-present connections between the stories told by our cultural institutions and political power.