Curatorship
NISHA MATHEW GHOSH WITH HEATHER AHTONE, DAKOTA HOSKA, SALLY FRATER . AAMC EPIC PROGRAM FELLOWS SEMINAR 2022 INTERSECTIONS.
Reflecting on possible cartographies of the de-colonized Museum of the present and future in a post- post representational world where the image of the imagination of the image is legitimized by social media as the only reality, this seminar looks at the on-ground overlapping realities of visual and virtual, physical and natural means to enable equitable representation that can subvert existing cartographies with new reflections and strategies.
The word ‘’intersections’ implies the idea of dividing something by passing or lying across it, which may be seen as a mode of representation without the nuanced context of a community’s material fabrications and reflections which are not adequate to allow the the ‘’represented’’ to be perceived as equal to the ‘’representor’’.
The Seminar will discuss the following sub-themes to unpack the discourse of the post-colonial Museum. The term ‘’colonial’’ can and must imply any act of subjugation that is predicated on presenting the ‘’Other’’ as a non equal.
In the Kolar Gold Fields settlements for instance, windows of precedent are framed to address three issues of inhabitation on the hidden, scarred porous and deep landscape running for kilometers under the ground unbeknownst to visitors. Three strategies and three art curations, namely DIGNITY to restore agency to the people, INTERCONNECTEDNESS to restore communities to ecology (the cyanide tail dumping post the retrieval of gold created vast flatted ‘’hills’’ of non-life degradation) and RESILIENCE to re-water the land with a water strategy (the vast underground network of deep tunnels and burrows are now filled with water, contaminating ground water with metallic residues); to RE-STORE, to RE-CONSTRUCT and to RE-WATER. Here art meets advocacy meets equitability.