Following the heart ♥: managing collective public emotions in museum collections documenting the aftermath of terror

Red, pink and in national colours, whole and shattered, drawn by hand and digital, hearts are everywhere in spontaneous public commemoration. Despite this omnipresence, heart imagery has largely been taken for granted. This article follows hearts across two collections in three Stockholm-based museums documenting the 2017 terrorist attack in the Swedish capital. We explore how hearts circulate and evolve, visually and together with accompanying texts, connecting the visual and material culture of commemoration with broader popular visual culture. We also explore the politics of emotions and the emotional work that hearts perform. We suggest that, alongside commemorating victims of the attack, public commemoration is also a site of social and political engagement and calls for social justice. This has implications for heritagising and memorialising terrorist attacks, in particular, the archival and museum collections used here, which document acts of terror and public reactions to them.