Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu with Taloi Havini, Leah Lui-Chivizhe & Jordan Wilson

Fault Lines: Imagining Indigenous futures for colonial collections

In recent years, museums have begun to come to terms with their contested histories. Colonial-era collections have attracted increased scrutiny, raising questions about care, custodianship, and curatorial ethics amongst visitors and the descendants of communities of origin. Grappling with these historic faults and contentious presents, Fault Lines brings together four Indigenous curators who recognise museums as spaces of fracture but also of latent possibility.

(Re)connecting collections currently held in Cambridge and global Indigenous communities, this exhibition de-centres colonialism as a core relation. Instead, Fault Lines focuses on how historic links between Cambridge, Bougainville, Hawaiʻi, the Salish Sea, and the Torres Strait might cultivate practices of care with global communities who have custodial responsibilities for these collections.

Resisting metaphors of passivity that often surround Pacific-focused exhibitions, Fault Lines interrogates the oceanic, looking to how tectonic shifts beneath the sea eventually, and often dramatically, manifest. Activating this geological framing, the curators embrace these seismic movements as a generative source of new land, life, and ways of knowing that affirm the endurance of Indigenous peoples in the face of historic and continuing attempts at colonial erasure.

Incorporating historic objects, artistic responses, and practice-based interventions, Fault Lines seeks to imagine and cultivate new approaches that are grounded in the present while looking toward the future. Testing the potential of the museum itself, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect on their relationship with colonial histories, to contemplate emerging practices for Indigenous collections in the UK and in Europe, and to consider the future of museums themselves.

Fault Lines: Imagining Indigenous futures for colonial collections is curated by Taloi Havini, Leah Lui-Chivizhe, Noelle M. K. Y. Kahanu, and Jordan Wilson. The exhibition runs from 3 December 2024 to 21 September 2025 at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge.

Read more about the curators' vision in this Interview with Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu.