The objects held in museums need careful preservation to keep them as they are, but the institutions themselves are transforming. They are finding a new purpose, highlighting local narratives and underrepresented voices, and giving visitors innovative, multisensory experiences.
A place to reflect and consider the future
In times of social, environmental, and technological upheaval, museums are valuable spaces where people can both reflect on the past and contemplate the future, says Sally Shaw, Director of the Firstsite art gallery in Colchester, England. For example, individuals will need to be highly adaptable in a jobs market that is disrupted by AI. “It’s about reimagining yourself,” says Shaw.
She believes museums and galleries can spark the necessary self-reflection. “These are places where there's lots of imagined futures on display,” she says. “We have to use them to talk about what we want for the future.”
Some museums take this as their sole focus, like the Australian Museum of Discovery in Adelaide, whose mission is to inspire young adults about future, digital and immersive technologies through a dynamic, changing exhibition program. Yet for other museums, it is not a question of jettisoning their conventional role exploring the past, so much as finding new ways to explore the past that reflects today’s fast-changing world.
Innovators are rewriting the museum script
In some cases, the first step is shaking off unwanted legacies of the past and discarding established norms about how museums operate. One such example is the John Randle Centre for Yoruba History and Culture in Lagos. Set to open to the public in late 2024, it says it will give visitors an authentic experience of Yoruba culture – starting with a more rounded view of its history.
“Our story didn't start with the ‘discovery’ of the Niger,” says Seun Oduwole of Studio Imagine Simply Architecture (SI.SA), the John Randle Centre’s architect. “There were civilisations, thought systems, social-spatial systems here long before the arrival of the Europeans.” That history is poorly represented in existing “Eurocentric” museums, he argues.
Traditional approaches also tend to mean that cultural artifacts are presented “in glass boxes in a very objectified manner,” Oduwole adds. That strips away context: a carved mask, for example, may be beautifully crafted, but is meaningless without the music and dancing of the religious ceremonies where it was worn. “To understand the power of that mask or the deity it represents, you’ve got to experience the full layer of meaning,” says Oduwole.
A noisier, more interactive experience for visitors
For the John Randle Centre, one way of providing cultural context is to showcase Yoruba origin stories. “We came up with this idea of elevating into the Yoruba spiritual realm,” explains Oduwole. Visitors ascend by escalator to the first floor, where they are greeted with loud oríkì praise song.
That sets the tone for the whole museum. Like Lagos, it is noisy and colourful. “In most museums, you’re not allowed to touch anything,” says Oduwole. “Here, you can touch. You can feel. You can see. You can hear. It gives you an interactive, tactile, multisensory experience.”
Experiencing a cultural landscape
The drive to provide an immersive, multisensory museum experience is also evident in AlUla, the county in Saudi Arabia that is being developed as a centre for fostering new perspectives on Arabian culture.
The region has a rich heritage, says Abdulrahman Alsuhaibani, Vice President of Culture at the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU). “Today, we have recorded more than 30,000 archaeological sites,” says Alsuhaibani. “That makes AlUla a ‘living museum’.”
With that bedrock, AlUla’s cultural and natural heritage are deliberately being interwoven in a way that promises to give visitors a unique experience. “You will never have an indoor experience that doesn’t connect you to the outside landscape,” says Kate Hall-Tipping, Culture Sector Planning Executive Director at RCU. For example, at Wadi AlFann – the ‘Valley of the Arts’ – visitors will find contemporary art installations in a desert setting.
Empowering communities
As well as being integrated with their environment, AlUla’s museum projects emphasise community involvement. For example, locals are being recruited as Rawis – Arabic for storytellers – to represent the region’s culture to visitors. That empowers the community, helping it tell stories of its past, to showcase its cultural identity today, and to discuss the future.
The net effect will be to provide visitors with a completely altered experience of visiting a museum. “You will see something completely different,” says Kate Hall-Tipping, “with different perspectives, different stories and different voices.”
For pioneering museums around the world, that approach is reinforcing a sense of museums’ purpose as places of self-reflection that can help society not only understand the past, but shape the future.