Paper short abstract:

In my paper examine the different ways of dealing with change and innovations in the Finnish museum field of the 1970's. Was the ideal museum to be found in the past or the future?

Paper long abstract:

The 1970's were a decade that brought many reforms to the Finnish museum field: There were big organizational changes, new generations of museum professionals, and new paradigms and pedagogical practices. At a moment of change one can look at the past with nostalgia or be excited about the future. In my research I look at how the earlier museum practices were seen and interpreted from the 1970's contexts, and how the future of Finnish museums was planned.

In my PhD-research I study Finnish museum culture and museum practices, and how the practices have been carried out by different agents. My research material includes a collection of museum professionals' interviews, which have been produced by various Finnish museums as part of a national museum history project between 2005 and 2010. The individual museum professionals' memories will be contextualized by analyzing different written sources from the 1970's.

Based on this material I ask how the interviewed museum professionals viewed their own role in the development of the museum field, and what kind of "museum traditions" or "museum heritage" they valued - or were they "museum radicals" who supported new innovations. What sort of utopian or ideal museum were they striving towards?

Paper short abstract:

Religious collections are multi-layered due to their tangible and intangible characteristics. These influence museum policies and are strongly connected to the museum professional, who is a product of its own time and background. An analysis of a museum of religion and its place in society.

Paper long abstract:

Religious collections are multi-layered because of the intrinsic qualities of the religious object itself. These objects enter museum collections by various reasons: art-historical, social, cultural and religious motivations play a crucial role in the process of collecting. Also, the way religious collections develop is very much connected with historical and contemporary developments in society. In a time of profound religious changes in society, religious museums see themselves confronted with new challenges. Secularisation and individual ways of practicing one's belief are changing religious landscapes.

Using the Dutch museum St. Catherine's Convent (Museum Catharijneconvent) as a case of study, the historical development of a religious collection will be shown, with a strong focus on contemporary ambitions and motivations for collectional development and exhibtion-making. How are historical and contemporary social developments influencing policy making? What role do personal interests, convictions and ambitions have in collection- and audience development? In answering these questions, the way museum professionals see themselves as part of a (religious) community will be an imporant part of research. Is St. Catherine's Convent a museum about 'us' or 'them'? Answers to this question will provide the possibility to reflect upon the place of religious museums in the context of ethnography and the museological debate on heritage and identity.

Finally, museums of religion often have to find a balance between the profane and the sacral. Museum professionals see themselves confronted with certain restrictions and governmental demands. Visions and imaginaries are often confronted with reality. This is something that seems to be a gap in the museological theory and debate.

Paper short abstract:

Little attention has been paid to the very concrete ways in which cultural heritage is affected by processes of commoditization. This paper focuses upon how two museums of Scandinavian heritage struggle with very different cultural and economic parameters under which they operate.

Paper long abstract:

Discussions of the cultural economy often focus upon the movement of such things as signs, media images, fashion and their entanglement in economic processes, but less attention has been paid to the concrete ways in which cultural heritage is affected by the processes and conditions of commoditization. This paper focuses upon how two museums of Scandinavian heritage struggle with very different cultural and economic parameters under which they operate. One, a museum of Scandinavian immigration in the US, is faced with the challenges of relocation and mobility and making choices how to curate its collection for new transatlantic migrants as well as those who migrated long ago. The other museum, a baroque style Swedish castle, is anchored in a cultural landscape dating back to the 17th century, unable to move and lacking the resources to fully open its doors to the public.

As both museums struggle to establish themselves as heritage destinations and vital participants of their respective communities, they face serious questions regarding heritage preservation, which this paper highlights. How do economic sensibilities effect the role of selection as these museums struggle with the conditions of their past and plans for the future. How do processes of emplacement effect curatorial decisions concerning accession, de-accessioning, and exhibiting? What is the role of tangible heritage when heritage is becoming increasingly digitized, and finally, for whom do they collect and in the process limit or enable the development of senses of community?

Paper short abstract:

Most ethnographic collections and museums in Europe have high expectations as to their role in promoting intercultural harmony and understanding despite the fact that they carry heavy colonial heritages. This paper investigates the strategies employed in attempts at achieving such a transformation.

Paper long abstract:

On the website of The International Network of Ethnographic Museums (RIME) the following description of the current and previous state of ethnographic museums could be found:

"The end of colonisation fundamentally transformed the relationships between the peoples who produced the objects in ethnographic museum collections and their former colonisers in the West. The need for ethnography museums to reassess their role has been further dramatised by the political upheavals in some former colonies, and by the major flows of migration to Europe. Ethnographic museums in the West now have the opportunity to use the accumulated wealth of their collections to provide the public with the keys to understanding other cultures as well as their own."

This paper investigates the strategies and practices employed in the attempts at creating transformations from colonially informed collections and exhibitions to promotion of intercultural dialogues through the 20th and 21st century.

Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates the relations between Swedish museums and research. Is there a need for scientific excellence when working with heritage management, collections, collecting and portraying cultural history or is this idea an utopia from the past?

Paper long abstract:

The relation between research and museums in Sweden has been a subject of debate among researchers as well as museum managers and curators during the last decades. The number of museum professionals with a PhD is low, which has been considered a problem. Publicly founded museums has for long been considered as reliable. The confidence from the visitors has been based upon the strong emphasis on reliable knowledge from the museums. But is this orientation towards authorativ knowledge a phenomena from a past century, now an utopia with no relevance, when transparency and visitor participation has became the ideals?

Museums of the 21th century is working participatory, they can no longer appear as authorities of knowledge. Experiences from the visitors and the citizens own constructions of heritage is just as important and interaction between museums and their visitors is at need. The notion of the need for scientific excellence at museums is challenged.

But is it possible to form a participatory museum without having a mood of work based upon research within this specific field, or is this also an utopia? Can a participatory museum be successfully formed without an interaction with research?

The aim with my paper is to investigate the relations between Swedish museums and research. Is there a need for scientific excellence when working with heritage management, collections, collecting and portraying cultural history or is this idea an utopia from the past? What is the relation between the participatory museum of the 21th century and research?

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how utopian visions have been at the heart of two museum projects 300 years apart: The collection of The Royal Society of Sciences in Norway in the 18th century and the establishment of Digital Museum in the 2000s. Both cases concern the centrality of mediation of knowledge and values through copying practices. The different mediating relations are studied in the two cases.

Paper long abstract:

In his book on the history of art museums, Andrew McClellan draws our attention to an overlooked body of early modern literature where museumlike structures appear in famous utopian texts. He traces the appearance of a utopian museum ideal across Europe in step with the growth of a culture of collecting and curiosity. At the heart of the idea of a perfect society lay an institution for the collection, production, and dissemination of knowledge, he claims. Connected to this ideal, it is argued, was a concern for distribution of knowledge and values, just as much as a vision of the museum as a collection of objects. Taking a cue from this insight, this paper will investigate how visions of a better world has been at the heart of the establishment of two different museum projects 300 years apart: The collection of The Royal Society of Sciences in Norway in the 18th century and the establishment of Digital Museum in Norway in the 2000s. In both these cases I study how mediation of knowledge and values through copying practices has been at the heart of the museum. In both instances, it will be argued, copying practices are the means of communicating. The obvious differences lie in what relations they are meant to make, and what visions they are embedded in. The nature of these relations will be discussed in the paper.

Paper short abstract:

Present paper inquires how can multiple and continuously changing cultural heritages be displayed and interpreted on a museum exhibition. What kind of ideological, methodological, and/or practical challenges might it bring along? What is the relationship of cultural memory and creativity?

Paper long abstract:

In 2016, a new permanent exhibition about Estonian culture, "Estonian Dialogues", will be opened in the brand new building of the Estonian National Museum in Tartu, Estonia. During the preparation process of the exhibition, the museum staff has faced the need to re-define the identity of the ENM as well as the whole concept of Estonian nationality.

Up until present day, the ENM has focused on preserving and displaying mostly the Estonian pre-industrial peasant culture. With the new permanent exhibition, the ENM strives to create a whole new cultural environment that would allow people from different cultural and social backgrounds to identify with Estonian culture as well as express their own personal identities. "Estonian Dialogues" intend to describe the everyday culture of various cultural and social groups of Estonia during the whole period of settlement. The exhibition narrative is above all about everyday life of ordinary people of Estonia, about their coping with traditional norms and rules, as well as with the major events of world history, and about their ability to create things and bring about changes. No matter how unrealistic, the goal to create a "biography" of all peoples that have lived on the Estonian territory in all times gives us an opportunity to define Estonian nationality in a new way and, as a national museum, act as a democratic forum that is equally accessible to all people of the state.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines museums presenting Israeli Muslim Arabs and Bedouins. Through the establishment of two collections, focusing respectively on contemporary art and the Israeli army, each director expresses a similar utopian vision: for their group to become a respected part of Israeli society.

Paper long abstract:

The focus of this paper will be on two museums in Israel. The visions of the museum founders are influential in all aspects of the institutions, from where it is located, through the layout, the accessioning of objects, and the organization of activities and ceremonies.

Twenty years after establishing an art gallery, Mr Abu Shakra is about to open a museum in Umm el-Fahem, a Muslim Arab city. The museum collection consists in large part of contemporary art. A question this paper will address is how effective a tool contemporary art is for implementing Mr Abu Shakra's utopian vision of making the Arab Muslim minority an accepted and respected group within Israeli (cultural) society.

Mr Ziad is the founder and chairman of Albadia - the Arab Bedouin Heritage Center and the Monument to Fallen Bedouin Soldiers in the Galilee. Half of the center's exhibit is ethnographic and half is dedicated to the role of Arab Bedouins in the Israeli army. This paper will look at how the presence of the memorial influences the accessioning of objects by the center. Furthermore, it will examine whether Mr Ziad's utopian vision of making the Bedouin population an accepted and respected group in Israeli (cultural) society can be realized by emphasizing the group's role in the army and by combining a memorial and a heritage center.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation will discuss notions of ethnographic surrealism and the convolution of imaginaries based on the performance Possible Worlds. It was initiated in collaboration with The Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, and is based on surreal juxtapositions and layerings of sound and video.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes its point of departure in the audiovisual performance Possible Worlds, which stems from a collaboration with The Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm (2014). Material from the museum was combined with sound and images collected on trips to different parts of the world. The result became a play with temporalities, place and performativity. Possible Worlds is now transformed into further iterations where the concept is developed.

In the performance recordings from early ethnographic expeditions are enmeshed with contemporary material from entirely different contexts. The material is mixed with computer generated electronic soundscapes, erasing the border between technologically generated expressions and material captured at concrete locations. Mundane everyday things collide with devotional objects, with undefined landscapes and actions as well as the non-place sounds from electronic circuits. The material is mixed through live improvisation during a 30 minute performance.

Possible Worlds is an attempt to explore notions of ethnographic surrealism and the interplay between evocation of worlds and situated performance. I use the notion of surrealism in an expanded sense, and draw on James Clifford's (1981) statement about ethnographic surrealism as a utopian construct and a statement at once about past and future possibilities for cultural analysis.

I will discuss notions of ethnographic surrealism and the convolution of imaginaries, and relate the discussion to my ongoing work with art probes. I will also discuss how Possible Worlds utilizes fragmentation and blur and the mixing and layering of sound and image in order to challenge notions of time and context.