MUSEUM FATIGUE

MUSEUM FATIGUE

a film about the past/present/future of the museum

a film about the past/present/future of the museum

SUMMARY

Museum Fatigue is a feature documentary project that critically investigates the past, present & future of museums through the lens of Benjamin Ives Gilman’s early-20th-century concept of “museum fatigue”. While Gilman connected fatigue to the physical discomfort of poorly designed display cases, this film probes deeper: it asks how exhaustion in today’s museums reflects broader colonial, capitalist & institutional structures. Through archival research, field visits & reflective visual storytelling, the film will reimagine the museum not only as a space of display, but also as a contested terrain of power, memory & belonging. 

Gilman’s concept of “museum fatigue” offers a powerful metaphor. His observations from 1916, that visitors physically strain to view objects because of poorly designed exhibition cases, remain tragically resonant. But today’s museums are not just badly designed: they have evolved into commercialized “cultural malls” gated by security systems, and shaped by the logic of spectacle rather than reflection. In Museum Fatigue, I argue that this exhaustion is not just physical but ideological. It is tied to the legacy of colonialism (which shaped many of the objects museums hold) and the pressures of capitalist funding models (which influence how museums display, sponsor and restrict access).

Visually and structurally, the film will combine documentary realism, observational footage inside museums, archival photographs, interviews with museum workers, curators & visitors with an essayistic style. I want to evoke a sense of disorientation and intimacy: the slow fatigue of walking through galleries, juxtaposed with the weight of institutional power.

By exploring Museum Fatigue, this documentary aims to:
+ Challenge dominant narratives of the museum as neutral or purely educational space.
+ Highlight how architecture, display design, access policies & funding models shape visitor experience.
+ Open a conversation about how museums might evolve in more just, decolonial & accessible directions

RESEARCH

As a visual anthropologist and museologist, I have long been interested in the politics of the museum, not only as repositories of objects, but as living institutions infused with histories of colonialism, capitalism and state power. My writing, visual research (video, photo)  has explored decolonization, art workers’ rights & the precarity within art institutions. Museum Fatigue feels like a natural extension of this work into the medium of film: a way to bring these debates into visual life, to reach broader audiences, and to interrogate how the museum as a form shapes (and exhausts) its publics.

“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

REFERENCES

The film will also reference fictional and speculative works to reflect on the museum’s potential futures and dystopian possibilities. The Soviet film “Visitor of a Museum” (Konstantin Lopushansky, 1989) portrays a post-apocalyptic world shattered by an ecological disaster, where the remnants of humanity - both ‘mutants’ and the last survivors of an earlier civilization - struggle to endure. Its protagonist, one of the few who still thinks and looks human, attempts to reach a mysterious museum hidden deep beneath the sea and accessible only at low tide, an ‘ethnographic museum’ preserving the ruins of a lost world. Though framed as science fiction, its depiction of a distant, nearly unreachable museum echoes the growing disconnect between museums and the people who seek them today.

We don’t have to look only to science fiction to understand the estrangement surrounding museums today. Popular culture also offers its own sharp observations. The Simpsons, for instance, repeatedly turns museums into sites of boredom, misunderstanding, spectacle or empty civic pride, places that promise enlightenment but often fail to connect with the very public they claim to serve. These comedic portrayals, though exaggerated, capture something real: a sense that museums have become distant institutions, more inclined to perform cultural authority than to cultivate meaningful engagement.

All screenshots, collages, photos, videos by the author.