The Museum of Truth and Reconciliation

Abstract

"The Museum of Truth and Reconciliation was instituted first as an activity and later as a collection, a beta-museum curated by the group of participants who took part in the singular art event on October 19, 2016 at the Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto. In my hybrid role as artist-researcher, I conducted the event as an attempt at situating or materializing notions surrounding truth and reconciliation, particularly as drawn from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC), in aesthetic forms, those accessible in the everyday, normalized spaces of the present that still hold traces of the past, whether tangibly or transiently.... This essay serves as a reflexive epilogue to the participatory art event, written as a compilation or Wunderkammer of thoughts and images that work around the idea of truth and reconciliation, a setting forth of ideas and activities through which an “end” is not prefigured. It seeks to set up connections between artistic practice and history through combinatory modes of thinking and doing. In this sense, the essay is not a definitive study and has not come to a conclusion or end, but should rather be read as an ongoing collection of thoughts, which could continuously be added to and reassembled."