Civilizing the (Civic) Museum: Decolonial Work at MOV
A Talk from MOV’s Director of Collections & Exhibitions and Curator of Contemporary Culture
On February 29th, join the Museum of Vancouver’s Viviane Gosselin for a presentation with The City Talks, a free public dialogue series on the possibilities and challenges of cities featuring academics and experts in their fields. This spring’s theme is “Museums in the City: Rethinking Colonial Urban Pasts.”
Viviane, who’s been with the Museum since 2010, will speak about how the Museum of Vancouver has adopted a model of co-creation and has prioritized community-led initiatives as a decolonizing strategy. This shift allows MOV to leverage its cultural influence to challenge the ideas of progress and belonging (and not belonging) and to make space for stories that allow for a broader and more inclusive way of thinking about the city’s past, present and future.
Learn more about Viviane’s presentation and the other museum talks in the series, and register here. The lecture is free, but you must sign up in advance.
Bio
Viviane Gosselin is the Director of Collections & Exhibitions, and Curator of Contemporary Culture at the Museum of Vancouver. Her work on historical and environmental literacy seeks to make the museum a more responsive, empathetic, and democratic public space that prompts people to recognize their own capacity to effect positive social change. Viviane has led and co-curated several exhibitions that have been recognized nationally and internationally. She has authored several articles on participatory museology and intercultural curation and is co-editor of Museums and the Past: Constructing Historical Consciousness (UBC Press).
Viviane is currently involved in developing sustainable exhibition design practices with a team of city staff, architects and designers committed to creating a no-waste city. Rather than talking about radical innovation, she prefers to focus on the power of small wins as a mean of furthering the social work of museums. Viviane is a member of the advisory group of the Coalition of Museums for Climate Justice. Since 2019, she has been a member of the Advisory Group for the Coalition of Museums for Climate Justice. Viviane earned her PhD at the University of British Columbia.
