Museums are haunted houses—this doc asks who gets to do the exorcism.
Decolonising the Curatorial Process is a forty-minute documentary which explores decolonial strategies in an academic and curatorial context. The film features academics, activists and practitioners, and contains case studies of institutions that are deploying critical, self-reflective forms of curatorial practice. The Museum of London Docklands exhibition on slavery and the sugar industry is examined as an example of how an institution can decolonise the curatorial process, utilise the work of artists in a museum context, and critically examine East London's imperial history. The Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford, who are working with Maasai activists from Kenya and Tanzania on a project centred on repatriating the museum's collection of sacred Maasai artefacts, also features in the film.
Direction
Orson Nova lets activists speak, not just academics.
Production
Pitt Rivers and Museum of London access is genuinely rare.
Director
Orson Nova
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The Pitt Rivers Museum still holds over 100,000 colonial-era objects; this 2020 film captures a rare moment of institutional vulnerability before repatriation became mainstream museum PR.
Director Orson Nova's name is a pseudonym—their anonymity mirrors the documentary's themes of whose voices get platformed and who gets erased in institutional storytelling.
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