As a child growing up in London, I had the privilege of visiting the various museums and collections available to the public, with the British Museum offering a popular option for a school trip. My experience of wandering through exhibitions and displays is something that sparked my interest in anthropology and material culture, however, now as an anthropology student, I am well aware of these institutions’ colonial legacy and their role in past and ongoing violence. I have also been taught to consider my positionality, meaning it has become critical for me to reflect on my perspective as a museum spectator, encouraging me to ask: what is my role in reimagining museums and collections?
When I was thinking about this question, I remembered two exhibitions: Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992-1993) in The Maryland Historical Society and the recent intervention in the British Museum, what have we here? (2024-2025) by Hew Locke. The starkness, irony and sheer horror of Wilson’s exposé, including a baby carriage containing a Ku Klux Klan hood and slave shackles positioned alongside silverware, made it a revolutionary exhibition within both the art world and museum culture. Now thirty-two years later, Hew Locke’s excavation of one of the most infamous museums in the world implicitly invites us to demand what, exactly, has changed since Mining the Museum opened in 1992?
As Locke deliberately uses the words loot and looting to uncover the journeys of various objects that have been erased by the institution, we can see there is a long way to go before museums fully address their active participation in imperialism and their continued reproduction of colonial violence. What struck me the most were the colourful figures of The Watchers that become part of the museum, hovering in corners and lurking behind curtains. As they point and silently observe, The Watchers call on the museum visitors to address their internalized complicity as they walk through the exhibition. Under their judging eye, the spectators become an exhibit, their unconscious bias and cognitive dissonance making them a part of the structure of the museum and its ongoing brutality.
By making his visitors culpable, Locke illuminates the complicity of the museum spectator. The tendency for museum visitors to don a gaze that is unquestioning, exclusionary, essentializing and comfortable, demonstrates our need for introspection when we walk through these exhibitions. While conversations about decolonising museums are often centred around curatorial and institutional change, this shows that only by approaching our personal discomfort can the museum and the spectator work together to cast off the language of empire we have received via museums.
Despite the need to question both ourselves and our institutions, Locke’s aim is not for the exhibition to be a ‘miserable show’. When Locke displays objects that have been scorched and damaged as they were looted, he doesn’t shy away from exposing their “messy” and violent histories. Yet, though his exhibition is designed to shock, he also intends to create a space for long overdue dialogue. It is through eliciting uncomfortable conversations and unsettling our preconceptions that I believe museums and collections can retain their value. By reimagining them as sites for learning about our colonial past and thinking about how we are implicated in this history, there could be a way to still incite that curiosity about different cultures and peoples that I had as a child. After all, the success that Mining the Muesum had in communicating the violence of empire, and the entrenched nature of slavery and racism to the public, is testament to the impact that collections and museums can have, when they are re-conceived to unsettle the status quo and oppressive structures of power.
