Communication
Curating Collections: Fostering Alternatives Narratives in Art Museums

Since the 2000s, modern and contemporary art museums have increasingly renewed their permanent displays on a regular basis, transforming rehanging into a programmatic event and an opportunity to imagine new forms of curating collections. The redeployment has become a central aspect of museum activity, extending beyond celebratory anniversaries, new acquisitions presentations, and thematic displays. Curating collections is now mobilized as a sustainable tool to engage with contemporary issues and to foster reflexivity from within the institution.

Drawing on two case studies from my doctoral thesis, this paper examines the emergence of curatorial strategies that directly address how museums can return agency to the “permanent exhibition” without reducing the visitor experience to a purely aesthetic encounter or detaching it from social and contemporary contexts. How can curatorial teams form new relational connections to collections that rethink historical canon and knowledge production?

In 2021, the Irish Museum of Modern Art launched a cycle of collection-based exhibitions titled The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now, which occupied the entirety of the museum’s galleries. Initiated by director Annie Fletcher, the project marked an ambitious repositioning of the institution as a “catalyst for change” and “a place for intellectual experimentation and theoretical propositions.” Structured in four chapters, the project does not focus on universal or national art history; instead, it foregrounds the socio-political contexts in which the works were produced and examines their resonances with contemporary issues in Ireland.

In 2022, the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne) presented Queer: Stories from the NGV Collection, an interdepartmental project revisiting their collection through a “queer lens.” The exhibition brought together a wide range of material cultures, spanning from ancient Greece to fin-de-siècle dandyism and twentieth-century queer activism. Through an extensive engagement with the collection, the project identified, retrieved, and rearticulated multiple narratives embedded in the objects, while questioning the history of the institution itself.