Decolonising museum cultures: an artist and a geographer in collaboration

There is much published research and strategic rhetoric on decolonising the discipline, the academy, and institutions of social and cultural importance. However, very little literature examines the stepping stones in the process of materially challenging, changing, and decolonising institutions themselves. This paper emerges as an outline of axes or episodes of dialogue in a collaborative journey between the artist Rosanna Raymond and myself, since 2005. We outline the issues encountered: some of these are intrinsically the legacies of imperial museology and the paradigms through which we evaluate and exhibit the cultures of racialised “others.” The episodes act as a means of understanding the politics and ways of decolonising that are possible. The collaboration enables the potential for interdisciplinary “ways of seeing” that counter colonial frameworks. The paper unravels the effect of imperial accounts of “other” cultures at museums, explored here through “Maori” and “Polynesian” curatorial practices and representations at the museum.