Priya Swamy

The title of this discussion moves forward from the legendary words of Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’, to grapple with the position that advocacy, change, and revolution happens outside of the systems, institutions, and popular spaces that produce and reproduce systemic violence. If activism around decoloniality, anti-racism, and anti-facism is by its nature immediate, can institutions ever be a site of similar change, given that they reproduce deeply embedded, systematised, racialised orderings of time? By attempting to see curating and collection development as ‘adjacent practices’, we can imagine together both the limits and possibilities to fashion equitable futures through and with museum-based practices and collections. Examples from exhibition/display practices, the notion of ‘colonial failure’, and collecting anti-racism will serve as points of provocation.