Contribution short abstract:

How might artists work to enliven and renew relations with objectified and sequestered museum items through material, digital, affective and discursive responses? We took from the ethos of Hui’s cosmotechnics to bring transnational artists in connection with past and present material practices.

Contribution long abstract:

The 2022-24 project, Prisoners of Love: Affect, Containment and Alternative Futures (PoL) aimed to connect material lodged in UK museums with dispersed home peoples, enabling artists, curators and researchers, from UK based diasporic communities, First Nations, Canada, Ghana and India, among others, to respond to complex histories, cosmological ideas, and material practices linking Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia.

Framing our methodology around ‘virtual visits’, we aimed to bring participants into museum collection stores, to develop techniques to improve the experience of virtual interactions, and to facilitate the sharing of knowledge, data and distributed art practices through conversation, research, reflection, and responses in the form of artworks, story and theory. By digitising, 3D printing and working with augmented reality as well as more traditional making processes, we sought to position archival material within contemporary technological frameworks that would also be reflective of the complexity of the thinking and practices enshrined in older approaches.

Highlighting our commitment to collaborative working, we brought together Hastings Museum & the Blackfoot Nation Mootookakio’ssin Project, Canada; Horniman Museum & Compound 13 Lab in Dharavi, India; Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford & The University of Ghana Archaeology Department. At the Economic Botany Collection at Kew, we demonstrated computational photography techniques and visited with material from Zimbabwe in order to facilitate future networks that might enable us to further develop the four process based exhibitions we curated in the UK and Canada during the project period.