Articulating a Museum from Absence: Emptiness in the Conflictorium beyond Pandemic Times

Abstract In this paper, we examine how the Conflictorium – Museum of Conflict in Ahmedabad, India, grapples with the complex and interrelated phenomena of emptiness and absence. We explore how emptiness at once appears, disappears, and reappears in museum spaces, and how activist curatorial choices around exhibition-making and community engagement intermingle with subtly enforced prohibitions (i.e., orchestrated or planned absences) from state actors. Accordingly, we discuss emptiness as both a spatial and discursive challenge, which mobilises tensions around what a museum ‘is’, what takes place in museums and who undertakes such actions. While we take note of the unprecedented phenomenon of emptiness in museums around the globe due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we nevertheless argue that emptiness has always existed in both traditional, larger-scale museums and in alternative (e.g., community-organized, self-funded, temporary or smaller) institutions. Emptiness can be perceived in various ways, but often manifests in privileging some narratives over others, excluding certain voices, bodies, and stories while granting others ample space on pedestals and exhibition walls. Forging a critical engagement with existing museum definitions, the Conflictorium considers a museum to be ‘nothing’ more than what its artists, curators and diverse audiences make of it – thus placing emptiness, as one manifestation of more structural absence, at its core. In accordance with this ‘negative’ approach to museums, we interweave political theories of conflict and antagonism (Landau et al. 2021; Marchart 2018) with critical museum studies’ accounts on the ‘radical democratic’ (Sternfeld 2018) and ‘activist’ museum (Janes and Sandell 2019) to conceptualise how emptiness can operate as a crucial component of (un)making museums as places for activism. In conclusion, the paper offers a conceptual discussion of activist museums’ political engagement with emptiness beyond pandemic survival strategies.