Queering the Museum

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About Queering the Museum

This group is for visitors to the Queering the Museum exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery who have taken photos at the exhibition and want to share them. The exhibition will be open from 4th November 2010 to 30th January 2011.

Queering the Museum

What happens when we stop thinking the world is straight? Through omission and careful arrangement of facts it is easy to assume that the objects held in museums have nothing to do with the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

In a bold new project, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, in conjunction with ShOUT! Festival, has allowed artist and curator Matt Smith access to their collections and galleries to tell the stories that museums usually omit.

Museums are expected to reflect society and culture. They make active choices about what is kept for posterity and how it is described and displayed. Turning the traditional on its head, a queer eye has been cast over the museum.

Objects have been rearranged and brought out of store and new artworks have been specifically commissioned to uncover, draw out – and on occasion wilfully invent - the hidden stories in the Museum’s collections.

“Subtly transforming the language of the everyday and the decorative, Matt's work seeks to reinvent the conventions of traditional domesticity , the home, family and normative sexualties from within. Ingeniously producing objects that are both reassuringly familiar and strangely new.” Oliver Winchester, V&A.

Sometimes serious, sometimes humorous, this exhibition will change how you look at museums and question what you see.

Running from 4th November 2010 until the end of January 2011, Queering the Museum is an Arts Council Funded exhibition, in conjunction with ShOUT! Festival and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

http://www.bmag.org.uk/events?id=1013&start=3