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Rationale The extensive experience in developing exhibitions with communities, particularly Indigenous communities explains the genesis of this project. In the international literature of exhibition practice their is a current concern shared by museums and other cultural organisations to present material that offers insight into knowledge and make possible a new understanding through context, presentation and representation. The relationship of scientific principles to the broader knowledge systems in which the principles have been arrived at and applied to technological innovation underlies the exhibitions. For example. to understand the boomerang as an object depends on the context as it expresses the application of physics to technological innovation. not lesser than but parallel to the inventions and knowledge applications of the west. One of the challenges in designing such an exhibition is to avoid making the object a curiosity from the stone age past or a lesser achievement. The physics of the boomerangs is no less a technological innovation than than that of the propellor. There is a tendency for western audiences to look at Indigenous technology and consider it to be just an accidental invention. Of course many inventions begin with accidents but what this exhibition will concentrate on is the achievement, in the same way western technologies are seen as achievements. The central idea in determining the scope is representation of indigenous knowledge in its own right. It is this idea that makes the exhibition innovative. |
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