Curating discomfort

Curating Discomfort was developed by the Hunterian Museum to address historical imbalances within the museum. This process involved several phases and was an ongoing process to embed anti-racism. Phase 3 of this process involved inviting a group of six people to form the Community Curators group. They are a group from different geographical backgrounds who have been in Glasgow for different lengths of time. They are academics, community activists, social justice campaigners and educators. They speak to this work as individuals with different interests and priorities. Over six months, they operated as a community to curate an intervention that is now on display in the Hunterian.

Nelson Cummins, one of the Community Curators, will discuss the process of being one of the Community Curators in Curating Discomfort. Exploring some of the positives and challenges of the work and how ‘Curating Discomfort’ puts forward discomforting provocations and interventions to help us to understand that museums have perpetuated ideologies of white supremacy: a political, economic and cultural system in which white western ideas control the power of the texts, the material resources and the actions that continue to underpin notions of cultural superiority.

About the speaker

Nelson Cummins is the Communities and Campaigns Officer at the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights (CRER), a role he has held since March 2021. In the role he co-ordinates CRER’s work on Black History and is involved in working with communities in Glasgow. He was also one of the Community Curators in the Curating Discomfort project at the Hunterian Museum. Curating Discomfort looked at ways outside of traditional museum authority to explore the interpretation of contested collections and to design and deliver a series of museum interventions that takes the museum out of its institutional comfort zone.

Book tickets