FWD: Museums Journal
Museum & Exhibition Studies Program
University of Illinois / Chicago
2025
STRUCTURAL INERTIA AND RADICAL ACTS:
WHO DECOLONIZES THE MUSEUMS?
“Since April 2024, the British Museum has not tweeted, as its posts were bombarded by people demanding the restitution of the stolen objects. Because of incidents like this, memes about the British Museum have been circulating online, satirically critiquing the ideological underpinnings that the institution embodies. Constant pressure and public critique are essential to hold these institutions accountable.”
Journal Urban People
Faculty of Humanities
Charles University / Prag
Vol. 26 No. 2 (2024)
THE DEADLOCK OF THE DECOLONIZATION OF MUSEUMS
WHEN THE COLONIZER BECOMES THE DECOLONIZER
in “Decolonizing Ethnographic Museums: Provenance Research and Restitution Politics in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe”
“Looting became something new during the three decades between the Berlin Conference of 1884 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, through the actions of anthropology museums. This is the brutish museum: a prolongation of violence in the name of sovereignty. These colonial museums became the infrastructure for a new kind of white supremacy.”
Dan Hicks
FWD: Museums Journal
Museum & Exhibition Studies Program
University of Illinois / Chicago
2022
VISITOR OF A MUSEUM
in “Manifesto”
“The German word ‘museal’ [‘museumlike’] has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present. Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are like the family sepulchers of works of art.”
Theodor W. Adorno