Who gets to curate SWANA history?

Who gets to decide what goes in a museum and how it’s displayed?

I love going to museums, but I’m also interested in the process of curation: who decides what objects go on display, how they’re interpreted, and whose narrative is being told?

Museums have a long history of bias, and it starts with who’s in the room. Arts Council England’s data shows that only 7% of people working in museums identify as Black, Asian, or ethnically diverse, in the UK.

Among curators, the people responsible for making all those decisions, the number is smaller still.

Beyond the displays, there’s the archive we never get to see. For example, the British Museum holds around 8 million items, with only 80,000 on display – that’s roughly 1% of their entire collection. The rest of it is stored away, divorced from the communities and lived experiences these belongings were from.

What we see, how it’s displayed, and how it’s described, matters. Especially when museums purport to showcase histories, art, craft or heritage from our own cultures and countries.

As an Iraqi, much of our historical artifacts are in British, French and German institutions.

Yet, Iraqis are almost never part of the narrative or decision making when it comes to curating these museums. And there’s real loss of knowledge and context and connection when museums misrepresent, misappropriate, or even erase our history. It impacts what others learn about us.

And furthers a disconnect between Iraqis today and Iraqi history. You see it in the narratives: rarely are modern day Iraqis and Egyptians and Syrians seen as descendants and inheritors of our ancient empires and histories.

So what do we do?

The thing is, pressure works – even if it’s slow. Just earlier this week the Science Museum dropped British multinational oil and gas company BP, marking a significant win for climate justice in the sector.

At Hekayyatna, we've launched a project with the Horniman Museum in South East London to change the museum records of South West Asian and North African belongings – because these are not mere objects, they belong to our cultures, our regions, and we need to think of them as part of living heritage.

Our campaign will end with an exhibition opening later this year that will put these belongings in conversations with responses, reflections, and stories from the SWANA community. Really putting our stories back into the museum.