Reconnecting Objects

In the context of major social and environmental emergencies at a global scale, and amidst civil societies' restitution claims across the world, this project critically interrogated the histories of collections assembled during the colonial time, engage in the re-connection of interrupted chains of knowledge and examine alternative forms of custody, object handling and display in African and European museums. For this purpose, the project brought together researchers who worked in close dialogue with artists, museum professionals, students and various stakeholders on both continents. The overarching common endeavor was the creation of two complementary, site-specific research exhibitions held simultaneously in Oxford and Dakar during the 2024 Dak'art Biennale. Epistemic plurality was at the core of this project: all its components were thus designed to allow for the cross fertilization of multiple approaches, to open up the sedimented meanings of objects and to foster learning from practices beyond the museum. To this aim, a digital working tool, the "anticatalogue", was developed which enables sustainable long-distance collaboration. Drawing relationships between the studied objects and documenting their historical evolution without reifying them, it can both act as a transversal working instrument to be used by all researchers across continents, and form a visual element of the exhibition in its own right.

Infrastructures of Containment: Museums, Beyond and Possibilities into the Future

This project within the Reconnecting "Objects" programme of research, and developed by Dr Lennon Mhishi, experimented and explored how museums develop simultaneously with, or alongside other infrastructures like the border, the reserve, camp, detention centre, the prison, and other technologies of containment.  Dr Mhishi focussed on some of the collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, particularly the African collections. Tracing elements of an enduring coloniality, the work revealed the functioning of museums as ‘containers’, consisting of colonial collections as products of violence, extraction and dispossession. Whilst the research also contended with how museums, in these processes claimed as preservation, also contain, through practices of, among other things, narration, display and erasure, the forms of knowledge, the histories and the possibilities in what become stultified objects, acquiring a different set of qualities. Concomitantly, infrastructures of bordering, detention and imprisonment are underpinned by the logics of carcerality that have also shaped museum practice. These infrastructures also ‘contain’ people, and in the frames of biopolitical governance, collapse their subjectivities into objects of risk, surveillance, and expulsion, also in the name of protection and preservation.

The project explored how we make use of museum infrastructure, space, and contemporary art, to explore and challenge these constraining legacies, and experiment with different possibilities for museum practice, including beyond the museum in questions of knowledge, mobility and planetary futures.