ABSTRACT
Cultural heritage collections from the twentieth century held in many public museums and art galleries constitute a rampant institutional consumption of cultural material that consistently exploited the trophies of colonialism. Contemporary artists are currently involved in decolonizing these collections, and subverting this organized consumption of an alienated past. In repurposing the collections, the resultant art manifests an aesthetic of reuse that collapses the distance between past, present, and future. Torres Strait Island artists involved in repurposing the Haddon Collection of the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology provide here a case study in this creative reuse. Collectable objects are being transformed through these artists’ practice into cultural tools that can subvert global consumerism’s obsession for the ‘new’, instituting instead interactive platforms of past, present, and future, in this way becoming a measure of cultural sustainability.
