The Emotional Museum: Exhaustion

How do you feel when you step into a museum? It’s rarely a simple answer. 

Through ‘The Emotional Museum’, a team of University of Glasgow researchers untangle the complex and often overlooked feelings evoked by collections and the spaces that hold them. 

Moving beyond the labels and the glass cases, we ask: what do these objects really do to us? 

From joy to exhaustion and from anger to ambivalence, join us as we explore the full spectrum of feelings that museums provoke. 

What do our emotional responses to collections reveal about power, identity and belonging? And how might reckoning with these emotions help us build more honest and accountable museums? 

In this episode, Amina, Caitlin and Fara explore exhaustion and confliction.

Transcript

AMINA

The systems and the societies we live in have brought us up to be desensitised to these things - but I don't know how… how should these histories be approached?

ZANDRA

The Emotional Museum is a series of conversations exploring what we feel when we enter museum spaces. Through intimate conversations, we unpack the emotions that surface among objects, stories, and silence - how memory, identity and power shape our experiences of museums, and how museums shape us in return. 

In this episode, we hear from Amina, Caitlin and Fara who explore exhaustion and confliction.

AMINA

The second one, it's themed around exhaustion and confliction. Maybe a good place to start the session is for us to talk a little bit about what these terms mean to us.

CAITLIN

Well, for me, confliction, when I consider that as an emotion, it's two completely opposite feelings: happiness, sadness, anger and joy - those kind of things.

FARA

My definition of confliction is pretty similar: two opposing forces that are at play. For exhaustion, I just to get us started, I looked at what the Cambridge dictionary definition of that is, which is the state of being extremely tired. Then I looked up what is the definition of tired, which was quite interesting.

So, it's obviously, it's defined as in need of rest or sleep, but it's also used to describe people, ideas or subjects that are not interesting because they are very familiar. If things are like very repetitive, that could be tiring. That's just like, that's tired, which I think also falls into my experience when I go into museum spaces.

AMINA

That's actually interesting. I never thought of it that way, in terms of the repetitiveness of an action making it tiring. That's actually a really good point. Exhaustion, the way I was thinking of it was, yes, in contrast to tiredness, but thinking of tiredness as a state of fatigue, but then one in which you can recover from with adequate rest.

But then exhaustion is like fatigue also, but an extreme form of that where adequate rest does not lift it from you, from your body, from your psychology. But then that also kind of includes things like frustration or burnout that I'm including in ideas of exhaustion.

FARA

It's interesting because I feel like we'll probably have different experiences of what being exhausted means to us, or maybe it might be more on a spectrum, like some spectrum of exhaustion on one end and tiredness on the other, and how we fall within that spectrum when we're visiting all these spaces.

So maybe we could start by talking about when you think about exhaustion in museum spaces, and confliction, what does exhaustion and confliction mean to you personally? How does it manifest for you? Is it physical? Is it mental? Is it all-encompassing of these things?

CAITLIN

Specifically what you were saying, Fara, about that repetitiveness - I think for me, when I'm looking in museums and I'm visiting different sites, it is often sometimes seeing the same thing, whether it's good or bad or… specific ways that some things are being displayed or certain histories are being told that sometimes it can feel like, because I'm seeing it so often, it does get a little exhausting. That's probably the best way I could describe it. Whereas the feeling of the emotion of conflict in museums comes out in different ways, depending on, I guess, which opposing feeling is more prominent.

Certain museums that I've been to, I’ve felt sort of empowerment, but I've also felt kind of like pain and sadness. But the main one that kind of comes to mind for me was one that - Fara, it was me, you and Taylar - I believe it was us three that went to, was the Women in Revolt, Art and Activism, 1970 to 1990. And it was an exhibition at the Modern 2 Gallery in Edinburgh as part of the National Galleries of Scotland, and it was looking at feminist art and some of the issues: pay equality and reproductive rights. I think that was kind of, that really stands out in my mind as being a moment, walking through, and it was specifically looking at abortion rights.

And it was just, it was almost like a full body exhaustion of being like, oh my God, they've been fighting for so long, and obviously in the current climate, just now, people are having their reproductive rights taken away from them. Pretty horrible realisation of how much people had fought for that right, to have that control of their body and how easily it could be taken away, and it was very sobering.

That was, on the one hand, I guess that was that exhaustion, but also that confliction of, we were in, you're in that specific space, and it also has so much empowerment of resistance. And you can see how all of these people that had been fighting and struggling had made such a difference in the lives of so many people, and yet it's still continuing.

This is however many years later, this is people who are, well, for me, I mean, I was born in the 90s, so that was just kind of the end of that, this is people that are before my generation and it's still something that we're all having to fight for.

AMINA

For me, I'm thinking back to the session we had, I think it was the Empire, is it called Empire?

FARA

The Kelvingrove Museum.

AMINA

Yeah, the Kelvinrove Museum, that one.

FARA

Legacies of Slavery and Empire.

AMINA

Yeah, I definitely felt a sense of like being weighted after going through that exhibition, both in terms of the theme, but also in terms of the space itself. There was a lot going on, there was a lot of people, and it seemed like the exhibition was being held in quite a tight space. So, there was a lot, there wasn't enough room for things to breathe.

FARA

Yeah, I think I relate to both of your answers quite a lot. I think when I think of exhaustion in museum spaces, I think of the physical aspect of exhaustion and then the emotional aspect. So, like physically in museums, it's usually indoors, there's no fresh air, quite dark usually. They're also quite calm, like very like atmospheric noises in the background. So, there's like this like sense, it's like the sensory overload in a way, because there's a lot happening.

You're taking in a lot, you're reading a lot of labels. So, it's like cognitively, it's a lot to like process and you're trying to like remember what you just read and then you're reading the next label and you're trying to connect two things. And that's quite like exhausting in that way. You're walking around slow paced, very exhausting. It's like going shopping. You're kind of just like mind- almost mindlessly, like, not mindlessly, but you're just walking through your space. And then before you know it, it's been like 3 hours.

Physically, it's exhausting and I tend to feel physically exhausted after museum spaces most of the time. And then there's the emotional aspect, which I think kind of ties into the confliction as well, where you're, yeah, you're like enjoying, I don't know if joy is the right way to describe it, but you're enjoying the exhibition.

You're enjoying the fact that you're able to experience items from different cultures or you're able to engage with these different objects that you might not usually have been able to just because geographically that's not a possibility.

But then there's the emotional fatigue as well because you're repeatedly seeing a narrative that maybe excludes people like yourself or yeah, there's a very, there's usually a very specific narrative that's being told in these types of spaces and that could be quite exhausting in that way because it's like a thing you ask people of colour continuously will be experiencing when you go into museum spaces.

So, for me, it's like there's the physical heaviness and then there's the emotional heaviness for me. And that's generally how I go through museum spaces, enclosed museum spaces, I'll say.

CAITLIN

Often museums that we visited have been huge, like just really, really big buildings, and like you said, there's a lot of walking around and often that can feel a bit like a maze, like you don't know how to get out and then you can't, like I don't know about other people, I feel, it ends up feeling quite claustrophobic.

FARA

That's really interesting. It also speaks to this idea of like the volume of stuff that's on display in museums and that can be exhaustive in and of itself. That's something that you notice when you go into The Hunterian collections, like, there is so much stuff to choose from and yet what they choose to display is also a very large volume of items - it can be quite like a colonial mindset to have.

AMINA

Yeah, absolutely. It was interesting, like when we were talking about it in our last debrief, I think the expression that Salma used was like the coloniality of collecting and of exhibiting and of preserving - how that is inherited from, yeah, the colonial era and how that continues to be repeated in the way museums curate their spaces and their objects. But yeah, I wonder why is it necessary to like curate museum experiences in that way?

FARA

If I think about why would someone want to display all of that, and I'm not suggesting that museums currently that have exhibits, they are trying to do this, but it is in a way like showing off how much you've acquired.

And so I imagine in the past - maybe that's not still currently a thing that's being practiced - but I think in the past for sure it was like a thing of ‘let's show off how much we've acquired’, whether that's through violence or other means.
Maybe there was money exchanged, but in any case, it doesn't matter how it was acquired, we're just going to show off that this is now ours, which yeah, that's quite… that's then kind of counterintuitive with trying to be spaces that are educational, because how are you able to really process what you're seeing if it's so overwhelming and exhausting?

Like, I can't even, I don't even understand what, why do you have three different vases on display right now? Can we not just focus on one and build a story around that, I would then maybe connect with and really maybe on an emotional level connect with and I would really then remember it and understand it in a way.

AMINA

I feel like this is connected with questions around repatriation, because museums have so many objects and it's like, yeah, we've got so much, we might as well show them. That's connected with questions around the provenance of these objects, where they got them from, how they got them from, and why do they still have them? Do they belong, still belong here? Should they be returned and can they be returned to their original, like, to their original communities?

CAITLIN

I think that really, for me, that puts into the idea of confliction, specifically walking around galleries and in museums, and I'm in awe of these beautiful objects or artworks. And on the one hand, it's just like, look at that beauty, it's amazing. And then on the other hand, with certain items, it can be, well, the pain and the violence that brought that here can really contradict one another.

AMINA

I'm trying to think, when I go through museums now, maybe it's like from an educational point of view, perhaps - I want to learn something or I want to critique something about a museum space. It's been a very long time since I've kind of like walked through a museum and looked at it from the point of view of beauty. Maybe like galleries. I might approach it in that way.

FARA

Yeah, so that's quite interesting and that's a question that I did want to ask as well to both of you because you're academics in the, shall we say, sphere of museums?
I mean, I know Amina, you're more in your curatorial, your focus is more on curatorial approaches.

AMINA

Yeah.

FARA

And Caitlin, I know you work within museum- like actually working within museum spaces, kind of. So you guys would, you guys do have a maybe more technical understanding of curation and museums, perhaps. So how do you think that academic side of you or that academic background affects the way you guys walk through museums that we visited?

CAITLIN

I know what I just said about the sort of, that joy and that beauty, but on a day-to-day basis, if I'm going into a museum, it's so different. The way that I walk into a museum now is not the same that I did years ago, or when I was a child and it's different to people that I go to museums with who aren't researching this in academia - it’s still so different.

I go in and I can't turn off that critiquing aspect of: What are they saying? whose history are they showing? Why are they showing it? What's not being said? The subtleties in language, the words that are being used, did they say that they collected something or picked it up off the battleground when they meant looted? 

Things like that, the more the strong understanding of the history of Scotland and some of these violent histories that we've grown to understand a little bit more - that has definitely affected in how I look at museums and museum spaces and how I feel in them.

I’ll always say that I love museums but it doesn't always feel like they love me back because it is so many different feelings but it's hard. I don't, like Amina said, I don't go in and just look at the beauty of objects. I always have those questions and I just, I can't turn them off. I don't know if that's just part of being a PhD researcher is that you're constantly thinking about your PhD. But for me very much in museums I'm always thinking about the research that I'm doing.

AMINA

When I go through museums, a question that I kind of ask myself with my curatorial hat on is how do I bring, how can I… how would I bring this space alive? How would I bring these objects… how can I bring these objects alive if I was the one working collaboratively to like curate these objects in this space?

So, bringing things alive is the question goes through my head as I'm walking through museum spaces. How do I bring a sense of emotion to it? Because I want people to feel some kind of effect, something, when they walk through a show that I've had a hand in, but in a positive way.

As I was just saying that, I'm remembering what Miles said - I can't remember it exactly, but you guys can help me out - but we'd come through the like pre-colonial section of the Museum of Slavery and we were kind of like walking through the contemporary bit where there was this wallpaper of individuals, black individuals that had some kind of prominence or achievement.

And I think what he said was that, yeah, maybe that poster is limited because he would want the single mum that, the single mum that was bringing up like a... a 10-year-old child on their own. He felt that they were also deserving of being on that wallpaper.

What he wanted to say was that he didn't want people's experience of like going through that pre-colonial bit to, he didn't want them to feel a sense of trauma or of being a lesser from being associated with the history of slavery. He wanted them to come out of that with a sense of like, yeah, I've achieved something.

Myself and my ancestors, we've actually achieved something. We've gone through something so traumatic and we've survived and we've thrived. Yeah, so like those kinds of emotions.

FARA

I think that last part, that wall of the celebration of black individuals that have had these great accomplishments also speaks to this exhaustion of like black excellence that… it's, you know, you'll be celebrated mostly if you're, you know, excellent - we must be excellent otherwise we won't be celebrated - very tiring and dated perspective to have. So, I appreciated that Miles said that and that he had, that clearly there's been a discussion with him and other curators that he works with.

FARA

If we consider that museums can be quite exhaustive, conflicting, when it comes to emotional experiences, histories that are told or untold. Do you think that museums are equipped, that they have the resources to... hold space for all of that emotional complexity, for all of those, all those various histories? Do you think they're equipped to hold space for all of those things?

AMINA

The immediate unfiltered response is – clearly, no! This is why we're kind of like having these conversations. Maybe this is what the whole decolonizing movement is asking questions about.

CAITLIN

Yeah, I do agree with you with that kind of unfiltered immediate is ‘no’, but I also think that partly stems from these institutions, museums and galleries, that maybe don't always anticipate the emotions of audience members, members of the public, people of colour, going into these institutions and the emotions that will be brought up with what they're seeing and how it's being displayed.

I think, as we know, just from some of the discussions we've had of the wide variety of emotions that we can feel in these spaces are just so different and it's so individual as well. So, I don't know how they could ever anticipate all of these emotions.

AMINA

But then also, like, continuing with the ‘no’ gang, there are like some people that just hate museums entirely, like, and say they shouldn't, they wouldn't even step into them. But that's not to say that museums should hold all these things, but maybe the things that they do hold, they should do it with, maybe with more care, more attention.

FARA

That's quite interesting to reflect on. Do they have to hold space for all these things? The answer is probably no, but as long as they're being, as long as they approach their museums with care, where they represent all different types of voices and narratives, and they're being transparent about how they've acquired things, how they've come to the museum, how they've put labels on items or objects or paintings.

I think that would go a long way. And also then having spaces that would allow for pause and reflection to make it less of an overwhelming experience would be very helpful.

CAITLIN

Sometimes with all those emotions it can be hard to pick out even what you're feeling.

AMINA

Yeah, so I think maybe we touched on this in Liverpool as part of that attention to care and to spaces of reflection. So, doing things that make the museum a more dialogical space rather than one of like consumption, like, consumption, like, consuming things on display. But I'm also like wary of museums pretending or acting.

FARA

I think museums, well, it's this whole thing of, a lot of museums attach this word of like decolonising.

AMINA

Yeah, and representation.

FARA

And representation. And, clearly, we're still long, a long way from actually achieving any of that. This, I read this once, it was like museums kind of speak at you, where instead they should be perhaps spaces that invite conversation. Yeah, allow for reflection of the individual, allow the individual to reflect upon what they're seeing. I quite like that about the International Slavery Museum, there were quite a lot of prompts to allow you to reflect. 

And even though we went there after, it's now been closed for renovation, so, this was a behind the scenes walkthrough - but I think there were a few spaces where you could have sat and reflected when it was open. And that was quite, that's just a nice thing to consider because these are heavy topics that you're being confronted with.

AMINA

The way that might help people, some people, from ensuring that these emotions that land on the body walking through these spaces, to ensure that they don't remain, that they kind of like expelled out. I think, yeah, dialogue really helps. I'm just thinking back to our experience in Liverpool, where we three, after the session during lunch, we kind of like sat down really organically, we hadn't kind of planned to do that, and I feel like talking through some of the things that we experienced both together and individually, helped me get things unstuck in my head.

Whereas if I didn't have that, I might have been reflecting on it on my own and maybe I wouldn't even reflect on it and it would just remain in my body. So yeah, reflections together somehow also help.

AMINA

So, we've been talking about exhaustion and, museums doing a terrible job of helping people deal with the emotionality of walking through their spaces! Maybe a good question that we could round off on is, what can they do better to help people work through the emotional nature of being in museums?

CAITLIN

Well, I guess, I think back to what we just kind of discussed and just holding, I guess, just museums having that space to allow for people to feel however they're going to feel, because people are going to feel, confliction or exhaustion or many of the other emotions we've discussed, like regardless in different situations, because everybody's different.

I guess just having, almost having that acknowledgement of it's like it's okay to feel this and really just to welcome, yeah, welcome these different emotions and these different feelings and not, I guess, as an audience member or museum visitors, not feel like you have to kind of repress these things. A bit like what you said when we had that little discussion in Liverpool afterwards, having that kind of reflection, that group reflection, just having spaces in museums.

FARA

The attention to language is important, making sure there's space to reflect, to pause. All those things are very important to, because walking through museums can be quite a difficult experience, because there's this like multitude of emotions that you're feeling. I think one thing that I find specifically exhausting about museums is when you're going, especially like, for example, if you walk through like art galleries and you see a painting of like a very clearly wealthy family, for example.

So there was one in the, so in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, there was a portrait of this, it was the family of Sir William Young, and it was just like, it was from the late 1700s, and the reason I want to bring that up is because on the label, on the side, I appreciated that it said that he was from a wealthy family, but that it did then incorporate that there was a connection to empire and slavery. And I liked that it wasn't, because a lot of these interventions that we've went to in museum spaces, it was like the original plaque and then you had an extra plaque that then contextualised it.

With this painting and the label, it was one label, so it would say like in one sentence, yeah, okay, this was a wealthy family, got his wealth from, et cetera, et cetera. But sorry, so it was celebrating him as he's a wealthy, prominent person in his community. but then also the reason he was, because he accrued his wealth through the enslavement of others, all these other horrible colonial practices. 

And I liked that I didn't have to do the, there wasn't that like mental barrier where I had to really think about or question, okay, it's the plaque is saying that this person is wealthy, but it's not saying where it came from, and then my mind is going to go to the worst possible case, which, not necessarily, they could have got their wealth from other places, but if it was from the 18th century, most likely not. But do you know what I mean?

So, I didn't, so it felt that was less exhaustive and I appreciated that it was kind of like, that's that person's holistic history, not like, oh, also as a side, this person did horrible things. It's like, that's the person as a whole.

They maybe were quote unquote a good person in the eyes of their community, but they were also, they also did these horrible things. And I appreciated that and that made it a bit less exhaustive.

AMINA

Yeah, that you didn't have to do the mental arithmetic yourself to like, figure out the truth behind this.

FARA

Or even, there were paintings in that, I didn't write it down, but there were a few paintings where it would say that the museum was currently researching the possible connection to empire and slavery, and I appreciated that, considering that the time at which this painting was made or the object was created, et cetera, there's a possible link and we're investigating it and I appreciated that I then didn't have to like go down that rabbit hole of like yeah, probably did.

AMINA

I was just thinking about again Liverpool like the violence of specific objects that are just placed there on display. So, at the Walker Museum, the Walker Gallery, there was the sheet of names of the enslaved and the shackle there on display. But then also when we were at the Slavery Museum, there was that KKK outfit and the blood splattered onto it... 

Yeah, I mean, these things, yeah, there's a very they invoke a lot of emotion, and for me, they invoke a lot of emotion, and I... I don't know how to, I don't know whether I feel like these things should be on display in the way that they're on display, whether simply contextualising them is enough, whether putting trigger warnings is enough.

Yeah, I have questions about all these things, about how do you create, curate objects of harm and violence, and should you be?

CAITLIN

Are museums doing enough to safeguard the emotionality of the people that work there, that are behind the scenes, that are having to deal with these objects that we are seeing as visitors, you know, with a glass cage, glass screen, you know, we're seeing one side of it. They're the ones that are having to hold these objects, touch these objects, write about these objects, and I guess I wonder what the museums are doing.

FARA

So I think today we've spoken a lot about this feeling of exhaustion and confliction, and we've touched on how as a visitor to museum spaces, there's a lot that you consume, whether that's information or objects. There's a volume to have to reckon with there. Then there's also the emotionality of what's on display -so there's a lot of violence on display or untold histories.

Or there's a lot on display, but then there's, so there's a history that's being told, but then there's also a very loud untold history that's being told because of that. And it also raises this question of kind of behind the scenes of a museum, there's an entire group of people that very intimately have to interact with the collections, whether that's preserving it, researching about it, and curating future exhibitions.

I think there's a lot to, and also within our session, we've been reflecting on how museums might become better equipped at dealing with these various emotions that visitors might have. Also, considering that museums should take great care with how they're taking great care of how they're taking care of their staff as well.

AMINA

But, also we ask questions about whether museums are the right, are the right spaces for holding all these objects and all these emotions. Are they well equipped to do that task? Should they be doing that task? And also, being wary of their, is it propensity for pretence, for acting, for shape-shifting and for co-opting?

FARA

Yeah, so maybe we can leave the listeners with that reflection.

ZANDRA

Thanks for listening to The Emotional Museum podcast. This episode was brought to you by The Emotional Museum, with The Hunterian at University of Glasgow.