The Stories Need to be Told : The politics of visibility/invisibility: Museum representations and participation of migrants, refugees, and ethnic minorities

Sammanfattning: International migration and the refugee crisis have sparked a number of debates within the public policy circle. This issue also has profound social and cultural implications, even in the museum sector. Despite the efforts of ethnographic museums to set aside skin colour or ethnicities as a means of distinction, and to be open to new perspectives, the representation of migrants, refugees and ethnic minorities still evokes the purported continuity of white supremacy as the persistent legacy of colonialism. In this thesis, my attempt is to examine the extent to which there is a probability of exercising invisible power in participatory and exhibition spaces. I look at how the Tensta Art Centre, as a small and local institute, tackles the production of different knowledges and attempts to become a space of appearance for migrants and ethnic minorities. I also compare its efforts with those of big-scale institutes such as the World Culture Museum, which is a Swedish ethnographic museum. This study investigates the possibility of producing a place of embodied institutional critique within exhibition spaces in an active and meaningful way. This has been explored through the concept of visibility/invisibility in the complexes of visuality, as evident in the observations made in my study cases. In addition, I have adopted a critical analysis approach to examine the possibility of having multiple and assemblage forms of knowledge productions in participatory spaces. Finally, through my study, I understood that despite the effort to make the new space without hierarchy, there is still the risk and possibility of hegemonic discourses and thinking that lead to complicities.