Seeing Truth in Museums brings together artists, curators and Indigenous knowledge holders to offer critical perspectives on visual and material culture historically collected for museums in situations of unequal power, in often violent and/or coercive circumstances, during the British colonial era.
Centring on a conversation between British artist /art historian Dr Jane Wildgoose and Tasmanian Aboriginal artist Janice Ross, Seeing Truth in Museums explores how artists and Indigenous knowledge holders navigate prevailing power structures in museums (and beyond) to tell truth about colonial legacies in collections, and associated intergenerational trauma, and to advocate for processes of reconnection and reparation.
In this Ethical Matters talk, Jane discusses the background to her work on Seeing Truth in Museums: sharing some of the discoveries she had made in museum archives, and reflecting on how these shaped her understanding of the history of collecting, and her ongoing practice as an artist.
This project was developed by Jane Wildgoose in association with Artquest and Conway Hall, at the invitation of the University of Connecticut; it is a new iteration of UConn‘s The Future of Truth / Seeing Truth project funded by the Luce Foundation with additional support from Arts Tasmania.
