Open AccessExhibiting Refugee Routes: Contemporary Collecting as Memory Politics
Author(s) -
Randi Marselis
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
museum and society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1479-8360
DOI - 10.29311/mas.v19i3.3155
Subject(s) - exhibition , refugee , solidarity , politics , contextualization , refugee crisis , framing (construction) , european union , media studies , political science , sociology , history , law , art history , programming language , business , archaeology , computer science , interpretation (philosophy) , economic policy
In recent years, numerous European museums have collected objects related to refugees. This article examines the Flight for Life (På Flugt) exhibition (2017), which the National Museum of Denmark organized based on a contemporary collecting project that took place in Greece and Denmark in 2016. Alison Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory is made use of here to examine how the exhibition invited visitors to identify with refugees. This empathetic approach had political potential by promoting solidarity with refugees. However, it did not open up a broader contextualization of the collected objects in terms of the migration policies of Denmark and the European Union. This article argues that museums, through contemporary collecting projects of the refugee reception crisis, engage in memory politics by framing how Europe will be able to make sense of the refugee reception crisis of the early twenty-first century.