The Imaginary Museum: Researching Imagination Through Practices of the Imaginary

Abstract In this paper we explore the idea of an equity of imagination in the context of learning in the art museum. We mean by this a shared mental space in which artworks and publics are afforded mutual agency and power to generate meaning, with opportunities to conjure new meanings for shifting and changing contexts. We focus on how this can emerge through artistic interventions that seek to expand definitions of what museum learning is and could be. We investigate these ideas drawing on the work of Boris Charmatz, and The International Institute for Important Items (The I.I.I.I), as well as from a range of thinkers primarily from a French philosophical tradition. Through this we discuss how research guided by the imaginary may be used to more equitably connect visting publics with public collections, which are changing and evolving repositories of collective imagination.