Curating With Counterpowers: Activist Curating, Museum Protest and Institutional Liberation

this article examines the recent turn in Anglophone protest cultures since 2007 towards curating, museums and heritage: a rise in the toppling of statues; demonstrations inside museums; and in the creation of exhibitions, displays and archives within the ephemeral spaces of protest camps and other mobilisations. It argues for the historical causes of this turn in movement cultures; examines the structural power dynamics of this extra-instructional curating vis-à-vis the practices and policies of cultural institutions; and puts these developments in critical dialogue with recent debates on ‘activist curating’ and ‘institutional liberation’. Lastly, drawing on this analysis and the authors’ firsthand experiences on both sides of this dynamic (as a core member of the collective Liberate Tate and as co-curator of the V&A exhibition Disobedient Objects), it assesses this trajectory’s potentials and limits as a cultural strategy for social change.