Holding Museums in Our Mouths

When museums are looted and monuments reduced to dust, what survives? What has survived for decades, centuries, and millennia disappears in days, in acts of violence that are difficult to measure. Yet the intangible endures, something carried not in display cases but in voices, stories, and the stubborn act of remembering out loud.

Holding Museums in Our Mouths explores what happens when objects are gone, and the institutions tasked with protecting them no longer hold these histories. Drawing on storytelling traditions and contemporary oral archive projects, we ask what it means to treat the mouth as a site of preservation and whether voice alone can safeguard what walls and glass cannot.

Before the event, we invite you to spend some time with Hrair Sarkissian's exhibition Stolen Past in Ibraaz’s Majlis, which resurrects looted objects through digital technologies. We will then explore oral traditions, how the body becomes memory, and how the digital realm allows reconstruction across the senses. 

Through participatory storytelling, expect to actively discuss, debate, and dissect questions with the rest of the audience. Come ready to listen, share, and think about what it means to treat the self as a museum.

Doors open at 5.30pm; talks starts at 6pm and finishes at 7.30pm.