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Fig. 1<\/strong> From Living Archive project, two ladies watching a video installation. \u00a9Ipek M. Sur<\/p><\/div>\n Within my research on collective healing in exhibition-making and art practice, the museum is understood as a charged environment: a site where historical trauma, spiritual belief, political memory, and embodied experience converge. Healing, here, is not therapeutic in the reductive sense. It operates at the level of structure and condition. It involves designing environments in which suppressed narratives can surface and audiences can encounter differences without being directed toward premature resolution. Such work requires dramaturgy and choreography within institutional space and attentiveness to rhythm, proximity, and duration.<\/p>\n Curating the Yin<\/i> therefore operates across multiple layers: spatial, relational, institutional, political, and temporal. It recognizes that impact is not measured solely through visibility or attendance, but through depth of encounter and durability of relation. Care, within this framework, is not sentiment. It is infrastructure. It shapes how objects are positioned, how communities are consulted, how rituals are acknowledged, and how shared ownership of history is negotiated.<\/p>\n In my own projects, this has meant designing participatory environments where visitors are invited not only to interpret objects, but to contribute narratives, gestures, or spatial interventions that reshape the exhibition itself. While relational aesthetics and participatory practices have long challenged curatorial authority, Curating the Yin<\/i> differs in its emphasis on sustained holding rather than activation. It is less concerned with producing interaction and more with cultivating conditions of attentiveness, care, and ethical co-presence over time.<\/p>\n The projects presented in \u201cMuseum Charge(s)\u201d<\/i> resonate deeply with this methodology. Each, in distinct ways, shifts from presentation to encounter, from object to relational field, and from explanation to mediation. What follows is not merely commentary, but reflection on how these diverse practices collectively point toward a necessary curatorial transformation grounded in relationality, accountability, and collective presence.<\/p>\n Museums have long operated within a representational paradigm: objects stood in for cultures; vitrines stood in for rituals; interpretation panels stood in for knowledge. Authority flowed from institution to visitor. The stage became elevated and the audience stood at a distance.The projects discussed during this workshop revealed the limits of that model.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In her analysis of exhibiting Sufi material culture at the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art et de Culture Soufis MTO, Estelle Brun does not treat kashk\u016bls and khirqa cloaks as ethnographic artefacts detached from practice. Rather, she foregrounds the symbolic charge embedded in their conservation, restoration, and spatial presentation. The decision to display cloaks openly preserving signs of wear is not a formal gesture but an ethical one. The involvement of Sufi practitioners in tying a service garment\u2019s belt, and the refusal to present sam\u0101\u2019 as \u201cperformance,\u201d mark a decisive break from spectacle. Interpretation is shared; authority is distributed.<\/p>\n Katharina Sabernig\u2019s Knitted Anatomy<\/em>, exhibited at the German Museum of Medical History, further destabilizes the conventional museum gaze. By introducing textile organs alongside historical wax models, she interrupts the visual authority of anatomical realism. The softness of wool counters the harsh exposure of human remains, prompting ethical reflection on what she calls the \u201cspiritually charged material\u201d of the body.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n A similar spatial transformation occurs in Farnaz Masoumzadeh\u2019s proposed honeycomb structure for Iranian epigraphic objects. Here, inscription is not treated as isolated artefact or decorative script; it becomes spatial theology. Meaning emerges through relational positioning through proximity, comparison, and movement within a constructed constellation. The visitor must navigate, not simply observe.<\/p>\n Across these examples, the sacred is not explained; it is encountered. We witness a transition from exhibition as representation to exhibition as relational experience. The curator\u2019s task shifts from narrating meaning to designing atmospheres in which meaning and relationality may emerge. Care becomes methodology. This shift resonates with my own research into relational curating, where care and collective healing function not as sentiment, but as structural strategy.<\/p>\n One of the most compelling threads across the workshop contributions is the erosion of singular curatorial authority. Dialogue here is not rhetorical; it is infrastructural. It reshapes not only how exhibitions speak, but how institutions operate.<\/p>\n Fang-I Chu\u2019s reflection on Green Island\u2019s National Human Rights Museum division exemplifies this shift. The proposed co-design of ritual petitions to Tu-Di Gong does not simply acknowledge local cosmology; it integrates it into the museum\u2019s mediating function. Writing and burning letters becomes a curatorial device through which political history, spiritual practice, and community anxiety intersect. The museum does not overwrite local belief systems; it negotiates with them.<\/p>\n Valentina Gamberi\u2019s Traces of Guanyin<\/i> further complicates curatorial authority through creative writing, drawings, and ethnographic reflexivity. The statues whisper; the curator doubts; fieldwork awkwardness is made visible. Rather than stabilising meaning, the exhibition foregrounds ambiguity. Deconsecration rituals are presented as contested and taboo not resolved through curatorial certainty, but held within uncertainty.<\/p>\n These methodologies resonate with broader critiques of epistemic dominance articulated by Edward Said in Orientalism <\/i>(1978), where representation itself is understood as a site of power. Yet what distinguishes these projects is their operational dimension. Dialogue is not staged as critique alone; it is embedded in committees, rituals, spatial staging, audio testimonies, and participatory practices. The curator becomes facilitator rather than narrator. Authority is not abandoned; it is redistributed.<\/p>\n Crucially, this redistribution of authority extends beyond interpretation into institutional ecology. Spiritually charged exhibitions rarely involve only curators and visitors. On Green Island, the museum is entangled with NGOs, political victims, ritual specialists, local islanders, and government actors. Chu describes tensions between official human rights narratives and local fears of haunted presences. The museum becomes simultaneously sacred democratic ground and ominous taboo space, a condition that cannot be curated without negotiation.<\/p>\n A similar relational governance model emerges at IGRMS, where tribal communities are engaged as co-creators rather than represented as static heritage. Ritual specialists periodically return to renew sacred structures, maintaining continuity beyond exhibition timelines. The museum operates within a living network of relationships, where curatorial decisions are inseparable from community accountability.<\/p>\n In these contexts, dialogue-based methodologies are not soft ethics. They are governance practices. Curating becomes a form of diplomacy, a collective negotiation among practicing communities, activists, institutional leadership, funding bodies, scholars, and visitors. What emerges is not consensus, but sustained co-presence. Dialogue, here, is not the opposite of structure but the structure.<\/p>\n In an attention economy governed by speed, metrics, and visual competition, spiritually charged exhibitions risk becoming aesthetic commodities. Slowness, therefore, becomes not only experiential strategy but political gesture.<\/p>\n The VR dhikr experience at MACS MTO invites immersion without explanatory narration. Visitors observe rather than consume. Chu\u2019s proposal to create ritual writing spaces on Green Island introduces slowness into a politically and spiritually volatile site. Masoumzadeh\u2019s honeycomb exhibition structure for Iranian epigraphic objects encourages circular movement and relational comparison rather than linear progression.<\/p>\n These are not interactive features designed for entertainment. They are choreographies of attentiveness. In a context of overstimulation, the museum must curate depth. Experience-based methodologies, therefore, are not technological trends. They are structural responses to the fragmentation of perception. The sacred cannot survive as surface-level aestheticisation. It requires temporal investment and embodied presence.<\/p>\n A striking commonality across these contributions is the centrality of the intangible. Sam\u0101\u2019, dhikr, ancestral mediation, ghost pacification, divine names, deconsecration rituals, these practices cannot be contained in vitrines. They are embodied, performative, relational. Museums have historically privileged materiality because it is collectible and classifiable. Spiritually charged exhibitions expose the insufficiency of this logic. But how does one exhibit listening? How does one stage absence? How does one respect taboo without reifying it? The intangible exposes the limits of the museum. It demands curatorial strategies that operate through affect, atmosphere and embodied practice rather than didactic explanations.<\/p>\n Gamberi\u2019s hollowed statues reveal how absence (the removed sacred contents) can become the very trace through which interpretation unfolds. Rodemeier\u2019s colour-coding proposal for the Oceania room suggests visual systems that indicate degrees of spiritual power without overdetermining meaning. Technology can assist; VR, audio stations, digital storytelling but ethical design remains primary. The line between immersive pedagogy and spectacle is thin. The sacred demands restraint. Across these projects, the intangible is curated and proposed to be curated through spatial dramaturgy, ritual collaboration, participatory gestures, reflexive narration and strategic absence. The museum becomes a mediator of processes rather than an exhibitor of objects.<\/p>\n Fig. 2<\/strong> International Sinop Biennale, artist presentation as part of the biennale programming (Suat Ogut is the artist). \u00a9Ipek M. Sur<\/p><\/div>\n Colonial histories permeate several of the cases discussed: Oceania artefacts acquired during German colonial expansion; Chinese statues collected through missionary networks; human remains displayed within European medical institutions. Acknowledging provenance is necessary but insufficient.<\/p>\n Susanne Rodemeier openly addresses the uncertainties surrounding acquisition in colonial contexts and the ambivalence of displaying human skulls in the Oceania exhibition. Gamberi reveals how missionary archives rarely documented deconsecration rituals, leaving the hollows of Guanyin statues unexplained absence becoming both material trace and archival silence. Sabernig references the colonial circulation of anatomical knowledge between Europe and Asia, reminding us that scientific authority itself was historically entangled with religious expansion and imperial agendas. These examples demonstrate that colonial entanglement is not a footnote to collections; it is constitutive of them as well as their presentation of today.<\/p>\n Institutional awareness, therefore, must extend beyond corrective wall labels or revised captions. A significant example of this broader shift can be observed in the Netherlands, historically one of Europe\u2019s major colonial powers. The Rijksmuseum has, in recent years, implemented structural provenance research programs, revised terminology policies, and publicly acknowledged colonial violence embedded in its collections. Similarly, the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (including Wereldmuseum locations) has developed restitution policies and collaborative research trajectories with source communities, embedding decolonial accountability into institutional frameworks rather than treating it as an exhibition theme. Yet even within these frameworks, restitution remains uneven, and symbolic gestures often outpace structural change.<\/p>\n What distinguishes such practices is not merely the act of research, but the integration of that research into governance, acquisition policies, terminology guidelines, and long-term partnerships. Colonial awareness becomes operational. If colonialism structured the formation of collections, then decolonial responsibility must structure the institution. This requires transparent research processes, reflexive exhibition designs, ongoing consultation with communities of origin that extends beyond project timelines and finally acceptance of unresolved tensions where restitution, representation, or interpretation remain complex and incomplete.<\/p>\n Institutional maturity lies in acknowledging that not all conflicts can be resolved through display. At this point, curating impact becomes strategic rather than reactive. Departments curatorial, education, research, public programming, collections management, and communications, must align to sustain ethical coherence. Provenance research cannot exist in isolation from acquisition policy. Education cannot promote dialogue if governance structures contradict it. Public programming cannot address colonial histories if institutional language remains unchanged.<\/p>\n Policy and curatorial practice are inseparable. Without structural integration between research, governance, and exhibition design, dialogical gestures risk remaining symbolic. Decolonial responsibility is not an interpretive layer. It is an institutional condition.<\/p>\n Across all contributions, a profound shift becomes visible. Objects are no longer treated as stable carriers of meaning, but as active participants within relational environments. Sacred charge does not reside in material alone; it emerges through positioning, collaboration, atmosphere, and care. What these projects collectively suggest is that curating spiritually charged exhibitions is less about explaining belief than about holding space for encounter. If we accept that objects can act as subjects, then exhibition becomes a field rather than a format, a space in which meaning is not delivered but negotiated. The museum, in this sense, is neither a neutral container nor an authoritative narrator. It becomes mediator, host, threshold.<\/p>\n The workshop itself embodied this shift: a space where diverse practices, geographies, and epistemologies met not to resolve differences, but to dwell within it. What follows is not a summary, but a condensation, a curatorial afterimage.<\/p>\n Something has shifted. Wood remembers. An ancestor stands A knitted organ quiets the gaze. Nothing here is only displayed.<\/i><\/p>\n Glass thins. If objects become subjects, Meaning gathers The museum is not a house of things. And we are responsible <\/p>\n References<\/b><\/p>\n Buber, Martin. 1970 [1923]. I and Thou<\/i>. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Scribner. Originally published 1923.<\/p>\n Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism<\/i>. New York: Pantheon Books.<\/p>\n Ipek M. Sur<\/b> is a curator, researcher, and connector based in Amsterdam. Her practice spans fine arts, performance, film, and social projects. She followed her MA in Photographic Studies at Leiden University and two Bachelor’s degrees from the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK) and the Marmara Faculty of Arts in Istanbul. Trained in classical ballet, design and performance art, Ipek brings a sensuous, embodied approach to cultural production. Guided by care, reciprocity, and deep listening, she weaves stories of migration, memory, and transformation. Her recent projects include Collective Healing, a curatorial research exploring ritual, memory, and embodied resistance. She has realized Circular Narratives at the International Sinop Biennale, ArtsMap, and Making Connections Through Arts & Culture, all of which combine art, policy, and community engagement. As founder and Artistic Director of the 7 Hills Foundation, she cultivates spaces where art bridges healing and collective consciousness. With experience as Senior Policy Advisor for Culture at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ipek brings strategic insight into diplomacy, cultural equity, and international collaboration. She serves on advisory boards for European institutions and helps shape platforms valuing process over product and presence over prestige.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"autor":[816],"dcntrdebates_blog":[801],"class_list":["post-13436","dcntrdebates","type-dcntrdebates","status-publish","hentry","autor-ipek-m-sur","dcntrdebates_blog-debate-4"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dcntrdebates\/13436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dcntrdebates"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/dcntrdebates"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dcntrdebates\/13436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13762,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dcntrdebates\/13436\/revisions\/13762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"autor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/autor?post=13436"},{"taxonomy":"dcntrdebates_blog","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dcntrdebates_blog?post=13436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}From Object to Experience: A Shared Shift<\/b><\/h3>\n
Dialogue as Infrastructure: From Curatorial Monologue to Relational Governance<\/b><\/h3>\n
Curating in the Age of Attention Saturation<\/b><\/h3>\n
The Intangible as Curatorial Core<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Fig.-2.png\")
Colonial Entanglement and Institutional Responsibility<\/b><\/h3>\n
Conclusion: Curating Impact as Relational Practice<\/b><\/h3>\n
Relational Field<\/i><\/b><\/h3>\n
\nThe objects no longer wait.<\/i><\/p>\n
\nCloth holds warmth.
\nHollows breathe.<\/i><\/p>\n
\nwhere we once placed a figure.<\/i><\/p>\n
\nA grove roots in concrete.
\nA letter-burns smoke answering silence.<\/i><\/p>\n
\nLabels falter.
\nThe room listens.<\/i><\/p>\n
\nexhibition becomes a field.<\/i><\/p>\n
\nbetween us.<\/i><\/p>\n
\nIt is a threshold.<\/i><\/p>\n
\nfor how we hold it open.<\/i><\/p>\n
\n