The Museum of Anthropology celebrates its new expansion with a multifaceted show that moves boldly across borders.

As curator Karen Duffek walks through the Museum of Anthropology, she takes a strategic detour. On her way to previewing the exhibition Border Zones, she descends a ramp opposite Bill Reid’s famous sculpture Raven and the First Men, and guides us through MOA’s gleaming new Multiversity Galleries. Like the old visible storage facilities they replace, the Multiversity Galleries provide the public with visual access to MOA’s rich and diverse collections. The organizing principles behind the displays, however, have shifted significantly.

Duffek, who is curator in the areas of contemporary visual arts and Pacific Northwest cultures, has a particular insight here. In addition to participating in the reorganization of MOA’s permanent collections for public display, she is responsible for bringing together Border Zones: New Art Across Cultures, which officially opens at the museum on January 26. This exhibition of contemporary international art is part of the series of events and performances programmed to mark the completion of MOA’s two-year expansion and renewal project, A Partnership of Peoples.

“We’ve been working with many of the communities represented to completely rethink the way in which the collections are organized,” Duffek says of the Multiversity Galleries. “You’ll be able to encounter different knowledge systems through the entire space.” The wealth of cultural objects on display—16,000 of them—includes everything from Kwakwaka’wakw mourning masks and Inuit kayaks to Samoan bark paintings, Chinese opera costumes, and South Asian puppets.

Duffek pauses in front of a row of glass-fronted cases filled with Coast Salish and Interior Salish baskets. “Here, things are arranged by family groupings, village, and community,” she says. “We’ve had many basketmakers coming in and working with us on how things should be organized in a way that makes sense to the community.”

Similarly, she says, MOA staff have collaborated with residents of Alert Bay and Kingcome Inlet to organize MOA’s stellar collection of Kwakwaka’wakw masks. “The masks are arranged by ritual order—the order in which things appear within the potlatch.” Duffek pauses, then adds: “A lot of the discussion here is, ‘How would you reconcile indigenous values with museum desires?’ ”

Two galleries, one old, one newly renovated and expanded, have been designated for temporary exhibitions. These are where Border Zones is being installed. Surveying the work of 12 international artists, the show includes ritual aboriginal sculptures by Ron Yunkaporta of Australia, a four-channel video installation about place and people by Hayati Mokhtar and Dain Iskandar Said of Malaysia, and a mixed-media installation that creates a dialogue between the Yangtze and Fraser rivers, by Vancouver artist Gu Xiong.

It was important, Duffek says, that Border Zones connect with the Multiversity Galleries and the spirit of the museum’s renewal project. “We wanted to ensure that the opening exhibit wasn’t something that just stood by itself in a little white box,” she emphasizes.

“One of the things that confronts us, as an anthropology museum, is the idea of cultural boundaries,” Duffek continues. Some boundaries have disappeared, others are “fuzzy”, while others still are being reasserted and redefined. Border Zones addresses these conditions, expressing a diversity of cultural values and experiences.

The show also looks at the ways in which institutions create cultural divisions, through designations like “high art” and “craft”, “traditional” and “contemporary”, even “anthropology museum” and “art museum”. “We wanted to cross our own institutional boundaries, too,” Duffek says.

And as we tour through the show in progress, it’s evident that the work on view could be exhibited as readily in an art gallery as in a museum of anthropology. There’s an electronic soundscape by expatriate Canadian artist John Wynne, with photographs by Denise Hawrysio, and a mixed-media installation on the theme of home, conceived by Sri Lankan artist Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan and executed by members of the local Tamil community. There’s also a disturbing sound and video installation by Paris-based Tania Mouraud. It smashes images of a colossal metal dump in northern Germany against metaphors of genocide.

One of the most unexpected installations is Boundary and Translation, a collaboration between Prabakar Visvanath, a Hindu priest based at a community temple in Richmond, and MOA staff. Through written and spoken words and video, this artwork documents the priest “sacralizing” a 15th-century bronze Vishnu figure from MOA’s collection.

Duffek explains that preparing the figure to receive the deity involved the priest’s pouring a series of liquids—rosewater, ghee, milk, honey, and oil—over it, washing it, then clothing it as for a procession. Museum conservators throughout the western world were gasping.

“The ritual crosses the boundaries of the secular museum and the sacred temple,” Duffek says. The act recorded here also messes up the divide between the old museum’s desire to physically preserve an object and the new museum’s impulse to recognize its cultural integrity. “It’s the life of the object that becomes important.”

FIND THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE (external link)

Photo by David Campion