Art galleries and museums can be contested public spaces where social hierarchies are questioned and subverted. They can present a range of different perspectives and beliefs, in which the past and the present are represented at the same time. Art galleries and museums are sites where dominant discourses can be critiqued by presenting competing voices and exhibiting diverse points of view. The conflicting voices and assimilation of the words of others, and the idea of meaning-making found between the speaker’s and the listener’s voices, can situate art galleries and museums as public spaces for dialogue.
In these spaces we can investigate how marginalized voices are able to challenge dominant narratives, allowing for numerous points of view and systems of belief to be articulated. Within many public art galleries and museums, marginalized voices struggle with dominant narratives, such as the points of view of European settler culture, I suggest that while authoritative discourse is located in the past and is a prior discourse, it still demands that we acknowledge it, make it our own, and examine how it persuades us internally. Some forms of discourse may be designed to suppress the destabilizing aspects of language use by seeking to uphold a particular sanctioned point of view, in what is called authoritative versus persuasive discourses.
The transmission and representation of authoritative discourse is important and yet in reality, there is a range of discourse systems of meaning, which are often contradictory and constitute conflicting versions of history. This range of discourse supports social institutions and practices integral to both the maintenance and contestation of specific forms of history and social and cultural power. Social structures and processes are organized through institutions and practices, such as the cultural and educational systems, located discursive fields.
Art galleries and museums can become contact zones and democratic spaces for everyone, encouraging an open space for many voices to interact with each other. The role of art galleries and museum in the process of meaning-making entails understanding the museum as a site for negotiating cultural borderlands and a space to create contact zones where different identities, people, art works and artifacts can discover new possibilities to develop a cultural re-mapping, to re-write cultural borders and empower the museum visitor. As public spaces, art galleries and museums can help facilitate the sharing of individual memories and stories as multiple versions of history offered in the public sphere with the intent of building community.
Narrative art practices reveal an anti-ideological, anti-hierarchical politic which is linked to everyday language that is used by ordinary people and can be understood as an expression of marginalized voices. I assert that we learn and grow as we interact with and assimilate into our consciousness the voices of those who surround us. The “words of others,” by revealing other potential meanings and the ideology behind the dominant discourse, make possible a space for new interpretations. Change becomes possible. If we can become aware of these conflicting voices, there is an opportunity to see other subject positions that open the door for the possibility of resisting fixed discourses and exploring other subject positions.
A dialogic approach to understand how art galleries and museums can be used as spaces for the community to explore subjective meaning-making processes. Pierroux (2007) further asserts that through an understanding of dialogical discourse, visitors to museums can develop processes of meaning-making, and by extension, museums should look at social media as a means by which “to shape museum discourse in the public sphere” (p. 223). In his words, “contemporary museology needs to develop a concept of interiority grounded in a sociocultural concern with the connections visitors make with objects, stories and experiences in museums and how these experiences interest [people] outside of the museum” (p. 223)