Jens Andermann and Silke Arnold-de Simine, Introduction : Memory, Community and the New Museum

Jens Andermann and Silke Arnold-de Simine, “Introduction : Memory, Community and the New Museum,” Theory Culture Society 2012 29: 3

New museums as part of the “postmodern shift from authoritative master discourses to the horizontal, practice-related notions of memory, place, and community.”

Narrativization and performativity of museum exhibitions to convey new meanings of horizontal, instead of vertical, model of sense-making. Museums as community formation, “making individual and collective audiences recognize themselves as subjects of rights and, thus, contributing to the democratization of culture and society.” “Many ‘new museums’ redefine their functions in and for communities as spaces of memory, exemplifying the postmodern shift from authoritative master discourses to the horizontal, practice-related notions of memory, place and community.”

Concepts of “social memory/communicative memory,” “postmemory,” “prosthetic memory” as different explanations of transfer of (traumatic) knowledge/meanings between generations. The idea of “prosthetic memory” explains how past experiences transmitted through stories/photography/museum exhibitions participate in the making of human subjectivity. “the museum has undoubtedly become one of the vital social institutions responsible for transforming living memory into institutionally constructed and sustained commemorative practices which enact and give substance to a group identity.” Still, museums are always part of the public space and capitalist culture, and instead of ‘reminding’ communities what they would like to forget, they often conform to stereotypical images, to what communities want to know of themselves.