Mariia Niskavaara

Conference Report. November 2023

I was thrilled when I received the confirmation that I was chosen to be a CIMAM travel grantee. It was an honor to receive the travel grant. And being a grantee was indeed great fun! I also met lovely and interesting people whom I would like to meet again and am happy to be able to call my colleagues. The program of the Conference was interesting, and I collected an exhaustive number of notes I haven’t yet been able to go through properly. However, I have always been keen to understand how museums create knowledge and what kind of knowledge systems they apply and maintain. During the Conference, it was interesting to see the diverse practices of the different museums, communities, and practitioners to dismantle elite, colonial, and heteronormative knowledge systems in order to create something new. However, only a few speakers mentioned the inherent anthropocentrism of the museum world.

During the last few years, it has been my overriding ambition to find ways to make museums work as a platform for societal change. The environmental crisis and biodiversity collapse are the biggest societal challenges of our time affecting millions of living beings globally. This has often made me think about how to justify my work as a museum practitioner, as museums as institutions do maintain the anthropocentric worldview and narrative of human exceptionalism. During the conference, many speakers broached topics such as community building in their speeches. That made me acknowledge that quite often by the word ‘community’ we mean something that is exclusively human.

Questions such as environmental crisis are often discussed under the theme sustainability. However, as a term, sustainability leads us to think of socially acceptable human actions and consumption within the capitalist system. As a term, it thus effectively prevents us from acknowledging that the world we live in is home to many non-humans and communities to which we as a species are connected and often deeply indebted. That is why I would like to see the discussion about environmental crisis going under themes such as those of this year’s Conference, and I was maybe a bit surprised that the environmental issues were barely addressed.

As a museum practitioner, I think that the task of museums is to serve their communities. To serve more-than-human communities is to shift from anthropocentric narratives to eco- and biocentric narratives, and to foster more-than-human memories and heritage. Through this lens, I see museums and exhibitions as a world-making practice. Maybe that is why I was also very inspired by the suggestion from Marian Pastor Roces to think about museum practices with mushrooms and mycelium. Through posthuman thinking practices like the one Roces suggested we could be more ready to create museums that can better serve our more-than-human histories, heritage, and communities now and in the futures to come.

Bio

Niskavaara is an aspiring curator-researcher who works with art museums to explore possibilities for socio-ecological sustainable futures. In her work with Finnish National Gallery, she has focused on creating public programs and exhibitions that give voice for marginalized communities and rise awareness of the climate crisis.
In her research, she is studying curatorial activism in art museum context. She is especially interested in finding ways how contemporary art could help communities and societies to find ways to fight climate change and biodiversity loss.

Ongoing education
Doctoral Candidate. The Doctoral Programme in Philosophy, Arts and Society, University of Helsinki. The expected year of graduation: 2026

Outline: The doctoral thesis studies several contemporary artists and the display of their work from the perspective of mass extinction and biodiversity loss. Through analysis of selected artists and the latest displays of their artwork in museum space, the research explores the question of institutional activism and institutional responsibilities for more-than-human society during the era of Anthropocene.