Articulating a Museum from Absence: Emptiness in the Conflictorium beyond Pandemic Times

Abstract

In this paper, we examine how the Conflictorium – Museum of Conflict in Ahmedabad, India, grapples with the complex and interrelated phenomena of emptiness and absence. We explore how emptiness at once appears, disappears, and reappears in museum spaces, and how activist curatorial choices around exhibition-making and community engagement intermingle with subtly enforced prohibitions (i.e., orchestrated or planned absences) from state actors. Accordingly, we discuss emptiness as both a spatial and discursive challenge, which mobilises tensions around what a museum ‘is’, what takes place in museums and who undertakes such actions.

While we take note of the unprecedented phenomenon of emptiness in museums around the globe due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we nevertheless argue that emptiness has always existed in both traditional, larger-scale museums and in alternative (e.g., community-organized, self-funded, temporary or smaller) institutions. Emptiness can be perceived in various ways, but often manifests in privileging some narratives over others, excluding certain voices, bodies, and stories while granting others ample space on pedestals and exhibition walls.

Forging a critical engagement with existing museum definitions, the Conflictorium considers a museum to be ‘nothing’ more than what its artists, curators and diverse audiences make of it – thus placing emptiness, as one manifestation of more structural absence, at its core. In accordance with this ‘negative’ approach to museums, we interweave political theories of conflict and antagonism (Landau et al. 2021; Marchart 2018) with critical museum studies’ accounts on the ‘radical democratic’ (Sternfeld 2018) and ‘activist’ museum (Janes and Sandell 2019) to conceptualise how emptiness can operate as a crucial component of (un)making museums as places for activism. In conclusion, the paper offers a conceptual discussion of activist museums’ political engagement with emptiness beyond pandemic survival strategies.

Keywords:

• museum
• conflict
• emptiness
• absence
• activist museum
• marginalisation

Notes

1 Other examples of museums focusing on conflict are, for example, the multi-sited Childhood War Museum (with locations in Bosnia and partnering organisations in Syria, Lebanon, and Ukraine) and the Imperial War Museums with locations in the UK and Ireland. For more on museums and conflict, see Hill 2021.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Friederike Landau-Donnelly

Friederike Landau-Donnelly is Assistant Professor of Cultural Geography at Radboud Universiteit, the Netherlands, and is interested in the interconnections between politics and space. She has published widely on artistic activism, museums as contested public spaces and the politics of public art. Her monograph Agonistic Articulations in the ‘Creative’ City: On News Actors and Activism in Berlin’s Cultural Politics was published in 2019 by Routledge. Her most recent book, [Un]Grounding: Post-Foundational Geographies (April 2021) explores radical notions of space. She is also a working poet.

Avni Sethi

Avni Sethi is an interdisciplinary practitioner whose work investigates the intersections between culture, memory, space and the body. She conceptualised and designed the Conflictorium—Museum of Conflict, situated in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India in 2013 and Mehnat Manzil—Museum of Work in Ahmedabad, focusing on informal labour and migration (in collaboration with Saath Charitable Trust) in 2019. She has written and spoken about the potential of small museums as spaces for social justice processes, as well as the role of empathy in art practice. Trained in multiple dance idioms, her performances are largely inspired by syncretic faith traditions and sites of contested narratives.