Reinterpreting the Past: Historical Narratives in Contemporary Exhibitions

Entering The Nature of Art exhibition at Borusan Contemporary, visitors encountered Refik Anadol’s Archive Dreaming (2017), an installation that digests vast archival documents into a visual cascade. Set in Borusan’s Perili Köşk, a 19th-century Istanbul mansion, Anadol’s work raises a critical question: How should museums engage with history in an era dominated by artificial intelligence?

This question is pressing. Over the past decade, institutions worldwide have reconsidered their historical narratives. The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), opened in 2016, exemplifies this shift. Its exhibitions highlight African American perspectives on pivotal US events, from slavery to the Civil Rights Movement. Borusan Contemporary’s 2023 programming paired contemporary digital installations with Ottoman artistic traditions, creating a dialogue between different epochs.

“Audiences today are not content with passive consumption of historical facts,” asserts Selen Ansen, Borusan Contemporary’s senior curator, in a September interview in Istanbul’s Emirgan neighborhood. “The goal is to converse. And conversation requires friction—between periods, disciplines, and even ideologies.”

This ethos has led to exhibitions emphasizing process over product. Digital Reflections: Revisiting the Waterways (2023) features video installations like Cevdet Erek’s Çark, which interact with Ottoman maritime maps. Instead of categorizing objects as ‘historical’ or ‘contemporary,’ the exhibition blurs those lines. Visitors encounter 18th-century Bosphorus navigation tools alongside soundscapes evoking centuries of water movement through Istanbul.

However, these curatorial experiments face criticism. Some argue that merging historical artifacts with contemporary art risks diluting their significance. “There’s a fine line between creating dialogue and collapsing context,” warns Sarah Abeles, an associate professor of art history at Rutgers University. She cites the British Museum’s 2022 pairing of Assyrian reliefs with digital animations, which sparked debate over whether such juxtapositions trivialize ancient craftsmanship.

Institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art tread carefully. For its 2022 exhibition Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room, the museum reconstructed a speculative 19th-century Seneca Village home infused with Afrofuturist aesthetics. Unlike traditional period rooms that fossilize their subjects, this installation layered historical sources, fictional elements, and contemporary artworks, resisting the erasure of Black histories.

“What’s becoming clear is that museums are in a transitional moment—not just in how they acquire and conserve, but fundamentally in how they define their purpose,” explains Lonnie G. Bunch III, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, in a recent essay for American Curator Review. This sentiment resonates globally. In Southeast Asia, institutions like Singapore’s National Gallery are integrating historiographical frameworks, linking colonial-era painting traditions with contemporary art dialogues.

Borusan Contemporary, though smaller, employs this relational methodology to create dynamic exhibitions. This aligns with its focus on time-based media and digital acquisitions, emphasizing art forms that resist static narratives. Ansen notes that Borusan’s collection policy prioritizes works by living artists, “embodying a deliberate choice to view history through the lens of the now.” A notable example is the museum’s acquisition of Bill Viola’s The Reflecting Pool (1977–79), a seminal video artwork exploring temporal fluidity.

The stakes of these interpretative strategies extend beyond curatorial theory. As museums navigate funding and scaling these initiatives, their choices reflect broader institutional priorities. The Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time initiative allocated over $16 million to exhibitions in California connecting Latin American and US histories to contemporary art movements. Similarly, Borusan’s 2023 season included sponsorships aimed at expanding digital infrastructure for sustainable AI-driven exhibits—a response to Turkey’s cultural funding challenges.

Yet, practitioners remain vigilant about oversaturation. “The risk lies in creating spectacles that distract rather than illuminate,” Abeles cautions. This critique highlights the ongoing tension in reframing historical narratives: do these projects deepen understanding, or do they become mere aesthetic collisions of past and present?

Borusan Contemporary’s 2024 program suggests how institutions might navigate this landscape. The upcoming Data Archaeologies: Tracing the Invisible exhibition will pair Turkish pre-modern manuscripts with generative AI installations that manipulate their forms. Although details are sparse, Ansen emphasizes that the goal is not to replace manuscripts’ socio-historical significance with technological novelty but to broaden their interpretative horizons.

The question of sustainability looms over these ventures. Exhibitions emphasizing digital interaction require substantial infrastructural and financial investments, raising ethical concerns about accessibility and carbon impact. However, as museums like Borusan and the NMAAHC demonstrate, failing to engage with historical narratives through contemporary lenses risks rendering those histories irrelevant.

As audiences increasingly demand participatory, layered experiences, the boundary between historical artifact and contemporary artwork continues to blur. Will this approach foster inclusive, nuanced understandings of the past, or does it risk fragmenting our collective memory into fleeting impressions? If Borusan’s curators are to be believed, the answer lies not in resolution but in persistence: the ongoing act of questioning how we frame and reframe history.