The Past is Now was an exhibition at Birmingham Museum & Gallery from 2017 - 2018 looking at the impact of Colonialism in the modern day and how Birmingham played a key role in the sustaining and fuelling colonial conquest. I co-curated this exhibition alongside the incredible Abeera Kamran, Mariam Khan, Sara Myers, Shaheen Kasmani and Sumaya Kassim.
At its height in 1922, the British Empire covered a quarter of the world and ruled over 458 million people. However, the creation and retention of the Empire resulted in many people losing their lives or becoming severely traumatised. Whilst the Empire has officially ended, its legacy still exists today in institutional structures and affects both individual and national senses of identity.
This exhibition challenged the typical colonial narrative used to present the history of the British Empire. By focusing on a few key events and themes, the exhibition examines the museum’s own bias in telling difficult narratives and explores other perspectives, which have been historically misrepresented. The exhibition covered 8 subject lines: Capitalism, Joseph Chamberlain as UK Colonial Secretary, Guns in Birmingham, Eugenics, Artistic Representation, Indian Independence, the Environment & Kenyan Independence items from the Museum’s collection.
This exhibition will be shown in our new gallery Story Lab. Story Lab is a space that will test different storylines and ways of creating museum displays.
This was one of the most emotional and hardest projects I’ve worked on to date, but to see the response from Black and Brown people visiting the gallery made it all worth it, whilst simultaneously making me lose all my faith in Museum structures.
Follow the hashtag #ThePastisNow to find out more about how the exhibition went.
Read Sumaya’s article about the process of working on the exhibition: The Museum Will Not Be Decolonised as well as BMAG’s blog here.