Performing DIY Museums in Murihiku: Decentralising the Museum

DIY Museums explored a decentralised museum model, that regarded the city and region as the site for responsive, intermittent acts of museum-making performed by and through the community. Part physical, portable and virtual, DIY Museums evolved in response to the arts and cultural environment in Mirihiku (Southland), Nui Tireni (New Zealand). Over the past ten years, this community had seen the decline of its arts and cultural institutions, including the closure of Southland Museum and Art Gallery, Southland Art Society’s City Gallery, Anderson Park Art Gallery and the Riverton Art Centre. In this environment, the DIY Museums research focused on the proliferation of ‘small’ and ‘micro’ museums, positioning their practices as unique and authentic DIY modalities that are frequently marginalised in favour of homogenised definitions and codes of museum professionalism.

With ‘small’ and ‘micro’ museums making up ninety percent of the sector in Nui Tireni, Murihiku is home to over forty museums, most defined as ‘micro’ or having no permanent full-time staff. DIY Museums re-imagined authority and value, through practice, occupying positions of ‘in-betweenness’ and challenging frameworks that have historically colonised bodies of knowledge. The thesis argues that differentiating communities as ‘amateurs’, in the expression of their own unique bodies of knowledge, characterises how adherence to rigid codes of professionalism creates ruptures or ‘disremption’ (Digger, 1994) between communities and their museums. The candidate’s role as a socially-engaged artist and curator in DIY Museums reflects her extensive cross-disciplinary experience in ‘small’ and ‘micro’ museums; at times curator, administrator, artist, collections manager, chairperson and so on. The DIY Museums project served as a field-test that set the stage for the facilitation of a new conception of museum professionalism consistent with socially-engaged art practice and institutional critique.

Access here: Performing DIY Museums in Murihiku: Decentralising the Museum (aut.ac.nz)