What Museums Post-Pandemic?

Abstract

The global COVID-19 pandemic revealed the vulnerability of the museum sector across the world. A plethora of reports and a tsunami of webinars by professional and intergovernmental agencies profile the severity of challenges faced by museums globally. New York or London or Paris are not the ones with answers anymore. Systemic discrimination of all kinds and humanity’s callous disregard for the climate emergency are foregrounded. A radical rethinking of the museum as an institution and its contextuality are needed. As much as the collections will remain hegemonic and central to museums, becoming relevant to rights holders will determine transformations and new normalities and modalities of sustainability. This discursive essay is an autoethnographic consideration of heritage futures, from the reflexive freedom of the lockdown in village India, after more than four decades of traversing and working with museums on all the continents.