Exploring Aotearoa Queer History Through Museum Objects

Abstract

Queer histories in Aotearoa remain unevenly represented within museum collections and public memory, often fragmented or absent due to archival and institutional limitations. Developed during the 40th anniversary of Homosexual Law Reform, this practice-led research asks how an exhibition of creatively reinterpreted taonga from museum collections can generate new forms of engagement with Aotearoa Queer histories.

Exhibition-making as its primary method of enquiry. I selected, reproduced, and spatially arranged artefacts to explore how their meanings shift in relation to one another outside institutional display contexts. The project culminates in a realised exhibition through which these ideas are explored in practice. Drawing on Queer theory, critical museology, and visitor studies, the exhibition translates theoretical concerns into spatial and material strategies, including non-linear layout, limited didactic interpretation, and the use of reproducible and reimagined artefacts.

These strategies foreground materiality, tactility, and scale to create closer, more provisional encounters with taonga. Reproductions and reworkings enable handling, comparison, and circulation, while moments of absence and withholding draw attention to gaps in the archival record. Rather than presenting a singular narrative, the exhibition invites partial, relational, and contingent forms of engagement shaped by visitor movement, prior knowledge, and interaction.

The project finds that reproductions and interpretive restraint enable forms of tactile, relational engagement not typically possible in museum contexts, while making archival absences perceptible rather than resolved. It also shows that non-linear spatial arrangements and limited didactic framing support multiple, contingent interpretations rather than singular narratives.

In doing so, the project suggests that exhibition practice can extend engagement with Aotearoa Queer histories by foregrounding absence, enabling tactile interaction, and supporting non-linear, visitor-led interpretation. It positions exhibitions not only as sites of display, but as spaces where historical, ethical, and curatorial questions can be worked through in practice, without requiring resolution.