Curating Difficult Knowledge

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies Series Editors: Andrew Hoskins and John Sutton The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of memory, from “what we know” to “how we remember it”; changes in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory; panics over declining powers of memory , which mirror our fascination with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last 30 years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This groundbreaking series tackles questions such as: What is “memory” under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination? Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad (editors) MEMORY IN A GLOBAL AGE Discourses, Practices and Trajectories Brian Conway COMMEMORATION AND BLOODY SUNDAY Pathways of Memory Richard Crownshaw THE AFTERLIFE OF HOLOCAUST MEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE AND CULTURE Yifat Gutman, Adam D. Brown and Amy Sodaro (editors) MEMORY AND THE FUTURE Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society Mikyoung Kim and Barry Schwartz (editors) NORTHEAST ASIA’S DIFFICULT PAST Essays in Collective Memory Erica Lehrer, Cynthia E. Milton and Monica Eileen Patterson (editors) CURATING DIFFICULT KNOWLEDGE Violent Pasts in Public Places Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers and Eyal Zandberg (editors) ON MEDIA MEMORY Collective Memory in a New Media Age Evelyn B. Tribble and Nicholas Keene COGNITIVE ECOLOGIES AND THE HISTORY OF REMEMBERING Religion, Education and Memory in Early Modern England Forthcoming titles: Anne Fuchs ICON DRESDEN A Cultural Impact Study from 1945 to the Present Joanne Garde-Hansen and Owain Jones (editors) GEOGRAPHY AND MEMORY Exploring Identity, Place and Becoming Amy Holdsworth TELEVISION, MEMORY AND NOSTALGIA Experience and the Mnemonic Imagination Curating Difficult Knowledge Violent Pasts in Public Places Edited by Erica Lehrer Cynthia E. Milton Monica Eileen Patterson Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Erica Lehrer, Cynthia E. Milton and Monica Eileen Patterson 2011 Individual chapters © Contributors 2011 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-29672-5 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-33390-5 DOI 10.1057/9780230319554 ISBN 978-0-230-31955-4 (eBook) This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Curating difficult knowledge : violent pasts in public places / edited by Erica Lehrer, Cynthia E. Milton, Monica Eileen Partterson. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–29672–5 (hardback) 1. Political atrocities—Exhibitions. 2. Crimes against humanity— Exhibitions. 3. Museums—Curatorship. 4. Museum exhibits. I. Lehrer, Erica T. II. Milton, Cynthia E. III. Patterson, Monica. JC571.C79 2011 303.605—dc2 2011013810 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Contents List of Figures vii List of Plates viii List of Maps x xi Acknowledgments xii Notes on Contributors Introduction: Witnesses to Witnessing Erica Lehrer and Cynthia E. Milton 1 Part I Bearing Witness between Museums and Communities 1 “We were so far away”: Exhibiting Inuit Oral Histories of Residential Schools Heather Igloliorte 2 The Past is a Dangerous Place: The Museum as a Safe Haven Vivienne Szekeres 3 Teaching Tolerance through Objects of Hatred: The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia as “Counter-Museum” Monica Eileen Patterson 4 Politics of the Past: Remembering the Rwandan Genocide at the Kigali Memorial Centre Amy Sodaro 23 41 55 72 Part II Visualizing the Past 5 6 7 Living Historically through Photographs in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Reflections on Kliptown Museum, Soweto Darren Newbury 91 Showing and Telling: Photography Exhibitions in Israeli Discourses of Dissent Tamar Katriel 109 Visualizing Apartheid: Re-Framing Truth and Reconciliation through Contemporary South African Art Erin Mosely 128 v vi Contents Part III Materiality and Memorial Challenges 8 Points of No Return: Cultural Heritage and Counter-Memory in Post-Yugoslavia Andrew Herscher 9 Defacing Memory: (Un)tying Peru’s Memory Knots Cynthia E. Milton 10 (Mis)representations of the Jewish Past in Poland’s Memoryscapes: Nationalism, Religion, and Political Economies of Commemoration Sławomir Kapralski 147 161 179 Afterword: The Turn to Pedagogy: A Needed Conversation on the Practice of Curating Difficult Knowledge Roger I. Simon 193 Index 210 List of Figures 2.1 Sculptural figures of refugees made by Fay Poole for the exhibition “A Twist of Fate: The Story of War, Torture, Pain and Survival” displayed at the Migration Museum, Adelaide, Australia, 1998. 48 3.1 The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia website home page. 60 4.1 Nyamata Memorial, Rwanda. (Photograph by Amy Sodaro.) 77 Exhibition display: Photograph of freedom volunteers by Eli Weinberg. Kliptown Museum, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2008. 98 Exhibition panel: Photograph of freedom volunteers by Eli Weinberg. Kliptown Museum, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2008. 101 Untitled, by James Mader, 1997. (Photograph courtesy of the artist and the District Six Museum.) 139 Igor Grubić, Black Peristyle, intervention at Diocletian’s Palace, Split, Croatia, 1998. (Photograph courtesy of Igor Grubić.) 154 The Ojo que llora, Lima, Peru in March 2008. (Photograph by Cynthia Milton.) 162 5.1 5.2 7.1 8.1 9.1 10.1 Communist memorial transformed. Przeworsk, Poland in 2000. (Photograph by Sławomir Kapralski.) vii 189 List of Plates 1.1 Peter Irniq Banner, “We were so far away”: The Inuit Experience of Residential Schools. (Courtesy of the Legacy of Hope Foundation.) 2.1 “Innocent Victims: Children’s Drawings from the Woomera Detention Centre,” curated by Serafina Maiorano. (Courtesy of the Migration Museum of Southern Australia.) 2.2 “Stories in Cardboard Boxes: The Survival of Cambodian Refugees in South Australia.” (Courtesy of the Migration Museum of Southern Australia.) 4.1 Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, Rwanda. (Photograph by Amy Sodaro.) 5.1 Exterior of Kliptown Museum. (Photograph by Darren Newbury.) 5.2 Wire sculpture of Z. K. Matthews, Kliptown Museum. (Photograph by Darren Newbury.) 5.3 Eli Weinberg installation, Kliptown Museum. (Photograph by Darren Newbury.) 5.4 Photograph of Jamia Masjid, Lajpur, Kliptown Museum. (Photograph by Darren Newbury.) 7.1 Butcher Boys (1985–6) by Jane Alexander. (Photograph by Mark Lewis. Courtesy of the artist and Iziko Museums of Cape Town, Iziko South African National Gallery, Permanent Collection.) 7.2 Truth Games series, Liezl Ackerman – not a church – Gcinikhaya Makoma (1998) by Sue Williamson. (Courtesy of the artist.) 7.3 It left him cold (the death of Steve Biko) (1990) by Sam Nhlengethwa. (Courtesy of the artist and Wits Art Museum.) 7.4 The Man who Sang and the Woman who Kept Silent (Triptych) (1998) by Judith Mason. (Courtesy of the artist.) 8.1 Billboard in Prishtina, Kosovo, summer 2004. (Photograph by Andrew Herscher.) viii List of Plates ix 8.2 Dalibor Martinis, JBT 27.12.2004, performance, Kumrovec, Croatia, 2005. (Photograph by Irena Sertić.) 8.3 Dedication of Monument to Bruce Lee, Mostar, BosniaHercegovina, November 2005. (Courtesy of Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art.) 8.4 “Don’t Forget,” Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina. (Photograph by Andrew Herscher.) 9.1 The Ojo que llora defaced, Lima, Peru. (Photograph by Yael Rojas.) 9.2 The Cantuta victims’ names crossed out. The Ojo que llora, Lima, Peru. (Photograph by Cynthia Milton.) 10.1 Tarnów, Goldhammer Str., 1990s. (Photograph by Sławomir Kapralski.) 10.2 Tarnów, Goldhammer Str., 2000s. (Photograph by Sławomir Kapralski.) 10.3 Tarnów, Goldhammer Str., June 2008. (Photograph by Mirosław Bieniecki.) List of Maps 1.1 Inuit communities map, “‘We were so far away’: The Inuit Experience of Residential Schools”. (Image courtesy of the Legacy of Hope Foundation.) x 29 Acknowledgments This volume grows out of the international conference Curating Difficult Knowledge held at Concordia University and co-sponsored by the Université de Montréal on April 16–18, 2009. We gratefully acknowledge the support for this event and the subsequent volume from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canada Research Chairs program, the Université de Montréal Faculty of Arts and Science, and the Concordia University Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies. We also thank all the conference participants for their enthusiasm and thoughtful contributions to the discussion out of which this volume developed. We are especially indebted to Shelley Butler, Anna Sheftel, the CEREV Post-conflict Studies reading group, and Palgrave Macmillan’s anonymous reviewer for thoughtful comments on earlier drafts. Thanks as well to Mark Beauchamp, Felicity Plester, and Catherine Mitchell for helping us with the finer details necessary to bring this volume to print. As the chapters provide finegrained discussion of curatorial practices, an art section displays the works of many artists and institutions, whom we wish to acknowledge for their gracious permission to include reproductions of their work: Jane Alexander, Mirosław Bieniecki, Igor Grubić, James Mader, Dalibor Martinis, Judith Mason, Lika Mutal, Sam Nhlengethwa, Yael Rojas, Sue Williamson, Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, District Six Museum, Kliptown Museum, Iziko Museums, Wits Art Museum, Legacy of Hope Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Migration Museum of Southern Australia, and Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art. xi Notes on Contributors Andrew Herscher teaches at the University of Michigan in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and the Departments of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Art History. He is author of Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (Stanford University Press, 2010). Heather Igloliorte is an Inuk curator and art historian from the Nunatsiavut Territory of Labrador currently completing doctoral studies at Carleton University. Her research examines the exhibition of Inuit and other global indigenous arts and cultures in relation to midtwentieth-century modernist primitivism and contemporary critical museology. She is the curator of the Legacy of Hope Foundation exhibition featured in her chapter in this volume. Erica Lehrer is an assistant professor in History and AnthropologySociology at Concordia University in Montreal, where she also holds the Canada Research Chair in Post-Conflict Studies. She is author of the forthcoming Revisiting Jewish Poland: Tourism, Memory, Reconciliation (Indiana University Press, 2012), and has undertaken experimental curatorial work on Jewish heritage and memory in contemporary Poland. Cynthia E. Milton holds the Canada Research Chair in Latin American history and is Associate Professor in the Département d’histoire at the Université de Montréal. She is author of The Many Meanings of Poverty: Colonialism, Social Compacts, and Assistance in Eighteenth-Century Ecuador (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), co-editor of The Art of TruthTelling about Authoritarian Rule (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), and is presently working on the edited volume The Art(s) of Truthtelling in Post-Shining Path Peru. Erin Mosely is a PhD candidate in African Studies and History at Harvard University. Her research explores the political and social roles of artists in the wake of prolonged conflict and war. Particular interests include transitional justice, truth commissions, collective memory and memorialization practices, and post-conflict visual culture. Darren Newbury is a professor of photography at Birmingham City University. He has published widely on photography and photographic xii Notes on Contributors xiii education. His book Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa (UNISA, 2009) is a study of photography during the apartheid period and its role in commemoration and historical representation in postapartheid South Africa. Sławomir Kapralski is a faculty member at the Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities. He has published on the subjects of social and cultural theory; nationalism, ethnicity, and identity; time, space, and collective memory; anti-Semitism; representations of the Holocaust and Polish-Jewish relations; and Roma communities of Central and Eastern Europe. Tamar Katriel is a professor in the Department of Communications at Haifa University. She has published extensively on a range of topics related to contemporary Israeli culture and patterns of communication. Her present research looks at counter-discourses produced and circulated by dissident groups of feminists and former IDF soldiers in campaigns protesting their government’s policies and practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Monica Eileen Patterson is a postdoctoral fellow in the History Departments at Concordia University and the Université de Montréal. Her teaching and research interests include colonial and postcolonial southern Africa, anthropology and history, childhood, violence, memory, and public scholarship. She is co-editor of Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline (University of Michigan, 2011). Roger Simon is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. His research has addressed the pedagogical and ethical dimensions of practices of cultural memory particularly as this applies to the remembrance of mass systemic violence. His work has explored the intersections of social and political theory, cultural practice, and pedagogy. Amy Sodaro is a PhD candidate in sociology at the New School for Social Research. Her research focuses on the use of memorials and museums as mechanisms for coming to terms with past conflict, violence, and atrocity. She is co-editor of Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Viv Szekeres holds an Honours degree in History, a BA in Education, and a diploma in Montessori Teaching. She has worked at the South Australian Migration Museum for more than twenty years and was Director from 1987 to 2009. She has published several articles on issues of diversity and representation in Australian Museums.