Exhibit Ireland

Among the holdings of the National Museum of Ireland ( nmi ) are more than 12,000 artefacts from Africa, the Americas and the Pacific and more than 50,000 items of Irish ethnography or folklife. Since 2001 the latter collection has been accommodated in a separate branch, the nmi – Country Life, at Turlough Park, Co. Mayo, after many years in less-than-adequate storage. The former collection has been described as one of the finest of its kind in the world, but despite the opening in 1997 of another new and extensive branch, nmi Decorative Arts and History, at Collins Barracks, Dublin, the nmi ’s ethnographic material is not currently – and some of it has never been – on display. It is no surprise that it is not at all well known. These fluctuating fortunes, both practical and ideological, since the nmi was set up in 1890 when a number of pre-existing collections were amalgamated, are a leitmotiv in Exhibit Ireland .

Art · Art history · Ethnography · Irish · Linguistics · Media studies · Sociology · Anthropology · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Museums and Cultural Heritage · Philosophy

• The “colonial object” in autoethnography

  Open Access•Briony Widdis•Curator The Museum Journal•2024

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