Museums and gender coding: photography and the concerned agency of pictures through digital exhibition spaces

Abstract

Museum history is a story of choices. Of physical and conceptual constraints that have been shaping, year by year, and century after century, the vision of art history we collectively abide by today. The drastic shift that has shaken museums and all other ideological structures in the last decades, the digital revolution, is calling for a rewrite, or at least a review, of the ways in which the museological cultural organization of knowledge exercises its power on individuals. Needless to say, old habits are hard to kill: the ideological stances which have been behind the western construction of knowledge are the foundation on which cultural and categorical choices are being structured in the digital realm. Yet the platform society which mediates this evolution, has its own multiple and ever changing systemic and technological dynamics. Ones which can, potentially, amplify and empower the dissemination of specific biases. This analysis begins by actualizing in the digital scenario the theoretical premises of Carol Duncan’s Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums and then applying this critical framework to the analysis of the exhibition Close Enough. New Perspectives from 12 Women Photographers of Magnum held at the International Center of Photography in New York between 2022 and 2023. As it will be argued, museum rituals we partake in today are mediated through a more complex and layered series of spaces and contents, where the steps that guide through the endorsement of ideological premises are subtly intertwined with the mediascape of our everyday reality. Ultimately, it seems that attempts to resignify the discourse around women through museum settings have to be wary of easy thematic choices, and conscious of the layered experiential dimensions that the digital realm has brought about.