Curating Lively Objects
Exhibitions Beyond Disciplines
Routledge Research in Museum Studies Series

Curating Lively Objects explores the role of things as catalysts in imagining futures beyond disciplines for museums and exhibitions. Authors describe how their curatorial collaborations with diverse objects, from rocks to robots, generate new ways of organising and sharing knowledge.

Bringing together leading artists and curators from Australia and Canada, this volume addresses object liveliness from a range of entwined perspectives, including new materialism, decolonial thinking, Indigenous epistemologies, environmentalism, feminist critique and digital aesthetics. Foregrounding practice-based curatorial scholarship, the book focuses on rigorous reflexive accounts of how curating is done. It contributes to global topics in curatorial research, including time and memory beyond and before disciplinarity; the relationship between human and non-human across different ontologies; and the interaction between Indigenous knowledge and disciplinary expertise in interpreting museum collections.

Curating Lively Objects will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of curatorial studies, museum studies, cultural heritage, art history, Indigenous studies, material culture and anthropology. It also provides a vital resource for professionals working in museums and galleries around the world who are seeking to respond creatively, ethically and inclusively to the challenge of changing disciplinary boundaries.

List of Figures; List of Contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I: Troublesome Objects: 1. Decolonising archives: killing art to write its history; 2. Rendezvous with the Indigenous Art Collection: how to ‘raise a flag’; 3. Troublemakers in the museum: Robots, romance and the performance of liveliness; 4. Curating data-driven information-based art: Outlive or let die; Part II: Metabolizing Objects: 5. Digesting institutional critique; 6. Curatorial care and the lively materials of biomedical art; 7. Living and semi-living artefacts on display: The monster that therefore is a living epistemic thing; 8. Troubling (natural) history: Bonnie Devine, Mark Dion, and Musée de la Chasse et la Nature; 9. Social objects, art, and agriculture; Part III: Energetic Objects: 10. Mineral materialities in contemporary art: Between intra-action, discursive magic and grief; 11. Objects, energies and curating resonance across disciplines; 12. Feminist new materialism, religion and perception; 13. Digital-physical-emotional immersion in country: Bearing witness to the Appin massacre; Index.

Lizzie Muller is a curator and researcher specialising in audience experience, reflective-curatorial practice and changing disciplinary formations in museums. She is Associate Professor at UNSW, Sydney.

Caroline Seck Langill is a writer and curator who researches intersections between art and science, and the related fields of media art history. She is Professor at OCAD University, Toronto, Ontario.