Politicized aesthetics: Questioning the neutrality of museum architecture and exhibition design

Abstract

Despite three decades of postcolonial critique and repatriations, most collections of displaced cultural objects are still hosted in the controversial architectural spaces of Western museums whose design shifts from an allegedly neutral ‘white cube’ to questionable forms of recontextualization. The contradiction between exhibited cultural objects and gallery space is primarily embodied by the history of the host buildings, and in this setting, the Western aesthetics of architecture and exhibition design practices embed a subtle form of neo-colonization reinforced by the rhetoric of the impossibility of repatriation. Through a critical review, this paper discusses the equivocal use of both ‘neutral’ aesthetics and recontextualized spaces for displaying African art/artifacts in Western museums. I offer not a solution but a set of derived principles through which we can start a conversation on decolonized design practices. If aesthetics are by-products of a specific cultural, political, and socio-economic context, how could the hosting architectural space respond to the aesthetics of cultural objects – if a response is even possible.