Curating Industrial Memories in a Museum: An Artistic Approach
Curating Industrial Memories in a Museum: An Artistic Approach

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the advantages of an artistic approach to collecting and mediating personal memories of contested pasts in a museum. It focuses on the community platform Backup Stories (Mažosios istorijos), founded and curated by the artist Auksė Petrulienė, which has been operating since 2017 at the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art in Kaunas, Lithuania. Dedicated to the museumification of Soviet and post-Soviet industry through working class testimonies, it is analysed as an example of bringing together memory activism, creative mediation, and critical reflection on the phenomenon of memory. The author argues that Backup Stories helps to reflect on broader issues at the intersection of museums and memory studies, such as the reliability of memory, the problem of the transmission of memory, and the museum’s commitment to its memory communities.

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