Embodiment at the edge of the archive: Private audience and public experience

Abstract

The 2015 exhibition This Is My Heritage – which opened at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane (Meeanjin in the Yugara/Turrbal languages), and later toured to a number of Queensland museums – invited twelve local Indigenous artists into their collections, to find, connect to, and speak about an artefact they found there. This chapter examines This Is My Heritage as an example of one possible strategy for de-colonializing not just museum spaces, but their collections and their audiences, and the relationship between the two. The exhibition approached this through the experience of the individual – not an abstract individual as a member of the visiting public, but specific individuals, with specific, entangled relationships to the archive. In doing so, This Is My Heritage presents a redefinition of “audience” for the museum as a shifting set of audiences, and suggests one possible means of reinventing the idea of public access.