As part of a series of blog posts about the new Museums Association’s Code of Ethics, Errol Francis, artistic director and CEO of Culture&, shares why it’s important for the new code to have an ethical commitment to anti-racism.
Museums are neither neutral nor disconnected from the imperialist Enlightenment narratives upon which many of them were founded. Enlightenment museums were conceived of as spaces for public education, dedicated to the diffusion of the knowledge systems that emerged from the classification of objects in the cabinets of curiosity assembled by Renaissance princes and aristocrats.
The founding mission of many of our national museums, as institutions of culture and civilisation, assumed the role as arbiters of knowledge and public education.
No longer are museums seen as value free or having a monopoly on knowledge, but are increasingly demanded to be spaces of social justice and debate. They are increasingly seen as institutions where the assumed supremacy of Western knowledge can be challenged alongside indigenous and marginal epistemologies.
As such, museums have become spaces of ethical and value disagreement, even conflict, particularly in relation to issues around racism manifested in disputed provenance, the display of ancestral human remains and Eurocentric interpretations of collections. There are also massive disparities between those who visit and work in them.
To tackle this problematic history and contemporary disparities, it is vital that anti-racism plays a central role in a more ethically and morally aware museological practice. Museums need to be more aware that they are places for humanity as much as they are for objects, and it is imperative that they engage with and have a commitment to anti-racism within robust codes of ethics.
MA individual members and representatives for institutional members will have the opportunity to vote on the new Code of Ethics as part of the AGM agenda that will be distributed to members from 15 September. Voting will take place through an independent online voting provider.
Photo credit: Natalia Janula