Anthony Shelton, 'Introduction'
In: Peep: Sonia Boyce. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1995.
Like texts, modern exhibitions are intended to tell stories and perform a didactic function. In common with texts, they can be divided into different genres. Some exhibitions work by providing a series of discrete collage-type assemblages, others aim for a systematic and coherent exposition of their field rather like the 19th century realist novel or a scientific text. Whether partial or definitive, compromised or apparently impartial, closed or open, all exhibition representations can never be more than relative and provisional. Given their provisionality and the always ambiguous nature of representation, it is essential that exhibition space should be democratised and as wide a part of the population as possible be given the possibility to construct their own narratives and representations of the subjects that are important to them.
Modern museums had their origin in the 19th century when notions of the ideal community were being discussed at the same time that rural migrations, expanding urban centres, homelessness, foreign exploitation and the growth of class differences were rapidly eroding earlier consensus's on the nature of settlements. There had to be a consensus on what was worthy to be exhibited and on its interpretation before representations could be justified to the wider population for which they were intended. Today we have lost faith in the possibility of community and with it, consensus itself has been abandoned. Never has the purpose or future of the museum been more problematic or doubtful. Nevertheless, new groupings based on shared interests, corporations, heterogeneous sexualities, etc. are replacing the older identities based on class, hereditary privilege, family, community and nationality. It is essential within this growing heterogenisation of the population that museums attempt to grant equal access to as many positions as possible. Within these new situations museums have the opportunity to proliferate along with the multiplication of sites around which identity is being reconstructed. Alternatively, museums by ignoring contemporary cultural developments and holding on to redundant models or representation may become inconsequential. Sonia Boyce's intervention in the Cultures gallery is an essential first step in building a site which, given adequate research and technical application, will assume the essential equality of narratives. The curatorial texts which her work replaces represents the beginning of a dialogue about the nature of culture, politics, identity and the interrelationships between different parts of the world. We hope that other curators regardless of background and specialism will take up this dialogue to establish a true interactive and dynamic space in which our fragmented populations can communicate to promote respect, understanding and creative stimulation of the differences that unite us.