Parallel: A Project About Structural Change with, Beside, and Beyond the Museum That Strives to Counteract Dominant Western and White Discourses

This chapter showcases an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage grant held between four partnering organizations: (1) UNSW Art & Design; (2) Sydney College of the Arts at University of Sydney; (3) Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University; and (4) Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA). Titled Parallel: structural change with, beside, and beyond the museum, the project responds to the Diversity Arts Australia report, “Shifting the Balance” (2019), which noted significant underrepresentation of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CaLD) people working in decision-making positions in Australian galleries and museums. The Parallel project invited six people of diverse backgrounds into curatorial positions at MAMA, in order to test the structures of the museum through engagements with local migrant and refugee communities. From this initiative, four projects have been presented to date with one of them developed collaboratively by two fellows. These projects directly spoke to the significant disruption to Whiteness that can be created when curators employ Indigenous methodologies of collaboration, highlight unspoken counternarratives, insert bla(c)k self-representation into collections built from Whiteness, and seek to change the accessibility and inaccessibility of the museum though offsite collaborations.