Reading time
9 min
To share this contribution please copy the url below
EN

A Salt Box and a Bracelet Conversing with a Painting. Decolonising a Post-Soviet Museum in the Caucasus

 
2 Madinatlostanova

Taus Makhacheva, Way of an Object, 2013. Installation view, photographer: Nikita Shokhov. Courtesy of the artist and the photographer.

Museums are institutes of knowledge production, conservation and distribution. Their decolonisation involves their liberation from principles which are deeply-rooted in modernity/ coloniality. Perceptive and epistemic operations which control the appreciation of, and interaction with, artworks and other museum artefacts are problematised. Decolonisation also questions the museum as such, as embodying the "hubris of the zero point" (Castro-Gómez 1995), or the sensing and thinking subject, European by default, occupying a delocalised and disembodied vantage point which eliminates any other possible ways to produce, transmit and represent knowledge, allowing for a world view to be built on a rigid essentialist progressivist model.