The politics of museal hospitality: Sonia Boyce’s neo-Victorian takeover inSix Acts

Abstract

Museums and their painstakingly curated constructions of history are increasingly being scrutinised for their heteronormative, androcentric and decisively white biases, often through museum interventions. Based on an understanding of museal hospitality as the constantly-shifting laws that regulate access to Britain’s prestigious exhibition spaces (and the intersections of these spaces with issues of race and gender), this article posits that Sonia Boyce’s Six Acts (2018) can be understood as a neo-Victorian intervention that critiques and forces us to acknowledge the conditions of Britain’s museal hospitality. In conceptualising the museum space as a host, based on Immanuel Kant’s and, particularly, Jacques Derrida’s notion of hospitality, this article argues that Six Acts addresses and modulates the relationship between host and guest, and interrelatedly, re-conceptualises the Victorian art gallery as a neo-Victorian museum (as an institutional space that self-consciously and reflexively engages with the gendered and racialised subtexts of Victorian visual arts). Boyce’s artwork performs epistemic labour, helping us to continually unlearn both the Victorian ideological biases that still suffuse contemporary discourses on heritage and art, on artistic merit as a law of hospitality, and a distorted imagination of a historically white Victorian Britain.

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