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The prologue reflects on the relationship of conventional museum curatorial practice to Smithsonian Folklife Festival curatorial practices. In particular, it examines the multiple mediations in which Festival curators are involved and the process of “presenting” artists and participants to the public. It raises questions about the perils of objectification of artists within these “living exhibitions” and argues for dialogic approaches to developing Festival programs that incorporate participatory or community curation.

This speculative comment considers the potential worth of raising questions that appear simple but may be rewardingly complex. It asks whether routine aspects of curatorial work, such as captioning objects and juxtaposing them in displays, may not have more suggestive dimensions than has been recognised previously. It asks what the implications of a conception of “the museum as method” might have for current approaches to public exhibition.

This chapter examines the politics, aspirations and antagonisms that grew out of the curatorial process underlying the exhibition, The Potosi Principle (Madrid 2010, Berlin 2011, La Paz 2011), and compare them to other Andean exhibitions including Bolivian Worlds (London 1987) and Luminescence: The Silver of Peru (Vancouver 2012, Toronto 2013). The chapter questions the category of contemporary art and examines its avowed potential as radical critique and the claims that it and other exhibition strategies have marginalised indigenous epistemologies and obfuscated historical agency. The implications of this conflict between western and indigenous curators and curatorial collectives on the right of self-expression and the freedom of interpretation and critique; associated ethical conundrums and the viability of epistemological pluralism will be clearly articulated as problems requiring serious museological attention.

ćəsnaɁəm, the city before the city is a boundary-breaking exhibition that has successfully challenged the museum world to revisit who is the curator and who is the audience. This chapter provides an indigenous-framed insight into kin accountability as (re)presented to the museum world from the local tribal/aboriginal community perspective of Musqueam. The exhibition was simultaneously displayed in three venues of the Vancouver city region, each providing multiple perspectives of the original inhabitants of a village named c̓əsnaʔəm more than 5000 years old. While the central city venue at the Museum of Vancouver was high-tech and pitched to an international museum visitor, the Museum of Anthropology exhibit was uniquely ephemeral, transient and aimed at shifting preconceived perceptions of what it means to be a modern aboriginal raised in a city established on thousands of years of unbroken occupation. The most challenging of the three exhibits was to be found in the Musqueam village Culture Centre. In this instance the art and treasures were displayed in a manner that required elders to provide interpretation and the audience is their own. Three exhibits, three boundary breaking contact zones, one people, Musqueam.

Australia’s first Migration Museum in Adelaide recognised from its inception in 1986, that representing migration history could not be done without acknowledging its intimate association with colonisation and the dispossession of indigenous people. Their first move therefore, was to create a distinction between all migrants, a category that included British ‘settlers’, and Indigenous Australians. This was significant not only because it implicated colonisation within migration history but because it made all non-Indigenous Australians migrants. The move though, was not easy to establish, largely because, in the public imagination, migrants were the other to mainstream or ‘British Australia’. In the mid-1990s, however, it seemed to work as Australia was indeed seen as a country that was relatively successful in integrating various waves of migration into its historical narratives while valuing cultural diversity and recognising the prior occupation of the land by Aboriginal people. The ‘War on terror’, the arrival of asylum seekers and the threat of internal terrorist attacks, along with changes in immigration policy and a general climate of fear has changed that, and migration museums are now working to combat a new wave of racism. To do so, I argue, they have developed a new set of curatorial strategies that aim to facilitate an exploration of the complexity of contemporary forms of identity. This chapter provides a history of the development of curatorial strategies that have helped to change the ways in which relations between ‘us and them’ have changed over the years in response to changes in the wider public discourse. My focus will be on both collecting and display practices, from changes to what is collected and how it is displayed, to the changing role of personal stories, the relationship between curators and the communities they work with, and the role of exhibition design in structuring the visitor experience.

This chapter proposes that YouTube should be understood as a digital archive with its own developing aesthetic forms where fans act as attentive and specialist curators of a star text. Through an analysis of three Mexican stars from the so-called Golden Age of industrial cinema, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete and Emilio Fernández, this chapter focuses on their YouTube star texts, and draws out what these mean for the nascent field of online re-meditated star studies. It also considers the ways in which the star’s gender determines how fans produce an online star text and how YouTube can be understood to function as a precarious archive.

The introduction outlines the book’s scope and addresses the central questions raised by the included chapters: when, how and why are bodies hidden or exhibited, and what is their effect, either desired or unintended, on various political, cultural or religious practices? With explicit reference to each chapter, a historic and disciplinary background will be presented, raising issues such as the increased application of forensic sciences on the discovered dead body, the emergence of debates surrounding necro-political strategies by states and political communities, and the economy and chain of custody over human remains resulting from historic and contemporary forms of violence.

Curation is a critical information management problem that has often been overlooked by prior information science research. Curation is important because people are increasingly acquiring large, heterogeneous archives of valuable personal data that they find difficult to manage and access. This chapter contrasts curation, where users are responsible for organizing their own personal information, with traditional information management models, which focus on consumption of public information organized by others. The chapter introduces the key curation lifecycle processes of keeping, management and exploitation, describing the interrelations between them. It argues that curation processes are deep-rooted and somewhat resistant to technology change.

Festivals have tremendous power to engage diverse audiences with new forms of cultural consumption, but also provide opportunities for enlightening debate and encouraging action for social change. The Bristol Radical Film Festival (BRFF) takes place annually in venues throughout the city of Bristol, in the South West of England, presenting a curated programme of ‘radical’ films and documentaries which are screened in non-traditional venues. Drawing on ideas of Latin American radical film making, the organisers explicitly sought to use the festival to connect community activists within the city. This chapter examines how festival organisers used the cultural capital of their association with the University of the West of England to help legitimise their activities, under the radar of university managers to create a novel form of societal impact.