DECOLONISING MUSEUMS

OPINIONS – VIVIAN ZIHERL
‘European post-war cultural project’
(a place-holder for aesthetic
idealist philosophy in programming
also, perhaps especially for
certain remaining colonial and globalising
institutions in the South)
has married with processes of
Contemporary Art’s own industrial
globalisation and financialisation
in ways that have made legible, and
complex, a certain delayed crisis
for liberal museologies. Some of my
research on installation and neoliberalisation,
but also aesthetic
autonomy in settler colonial space
(with Danny Butt), addresses this.
I think what is also interesting and
contradictory about the present
moment is a certain schizoid twohand
over-identification and denaturalisation
of remaining colonial
art institutional power and authority
by ‘autonomous’ and independent
practitioners for the purpose
of the defense of infrastructures.
In so far as Contemporary Art has been this space
of absolute overlap of processes of ‘democratisation’
than I can probably be
fully conscious of. The
work of people like Gary
Foley and Richard Bell,
alongside the committed
trajectories of
indigenous curators and
independent organising
collectives, and enduring
indigenous-non-indigenous
collaborations
reintroduce discourses
of political autonomy and
sovereignty in full relationship
to the artistic
and aesthetic questions.
Maryrose Casey’s
archival research into
original performance and
staging economies on the
frontier, and Stephen
Gilchrist (Yamatji)’s
framing of the indigeneity
of curation,
recently consolidated
for me the deep historical
time and autonomy of
mediation practices of
Indigenous avantgardes.
Postcolonialities of
camera movement, proprietary
colour and
lens technologies I
on the display side, with post-Fordist
mobility circulating ‘difference’
redacted via curat-
via near-full market liberalisation 7,
including more recently of cultural
institutions themselves, it is interesting
that it is only now that the Lindsay Johnson, and
Mahajan). Jackie and
Juliri Ingra, elders
‘colonising’ forces of capital are felt
on the material-symbolic inside of
the euro-humanitarian border that
certain continuities (of European
modernism and colonialism) are
being processed more publicly. archive of activism
‘Human rights’ over ‘class conflict’
was the framing politicising wager
ing the work of Ron
of Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11;
skip forward to this year’s Venice
Biennale and Capital is remediated
at GoMA.
(this is not to deflate the integrity of
the curation of the former or overstate
the salience of the latter, but
value here, as has
to point to the stealth of neoliberal
The Threat of Race:
transition in its period of trafficking
in ‘unrealised’ democracy). The
European Union is legally colonising
the state of Greece through
the same process of “accumulation by dispossession”
captured in the 8 David Harvey’s piece of your curatorial
ing and archiving Kumar
Shahani’s films for GoMA
(also via the writings
of cinematographer, KK
of the Goreng Goreng in
Gladstone, Queensland,
teach the oral history
of my home town alongside
Baiali and Goereng
peoples, and the region’s
and art that I was not
exposed to prior, includ-
Hurly, recently given a
fantastic retrospective
curated by Bruce McLean
7. Arjun Appadurai’s
work has been of great
David Theo Goldberg’s
Reflections on Racial
Neoliberalism, Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.
L’INTERNATIONALE ONLINE – VIVIAN ZIHERL – 178