Horniman Museum and Gardens

Addressing colonial legacies through co-production with 茶, चाय, Tea (Cha, Chai, Tea)

The Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund provided funding to the Horniman Museum to increase its audiences from London’s South Asian and East and South-East Asian communities by co-producing a temporary exhibition, 茶, चाय, Tea (Cha, Chai, Tea), exploring the global history of tea and addressing the museum’s colonial legacy, led by South Asian and East and South-East Asian community partners.

Turning traditional museum thinking on its head, the museum’s first step, several months before applying for funding, was to consult extensively with community groups, asking what they would want to say and see in an exhibition around tea and its role in colonialism, and what stories they would want the objects to tell.

As a result, the museum reworked its understanding of the audience that it wanted to engage with it, and co-developed exhibition themes, narrative and interpretation.

Only after it had conducted this foundational consultation did the museum invite community groups – who all work to create social impact – to collaborate, asking if they were interested in partnering within the scope of their own work.

Equally shared decision-making and community-led and inclusive practice were key to collaboration. Each community partner was responsible for its own budget and for creating content for its chosen exhibition area. They led on every aspect of the exhibition, including its target audience, content, narrative, interpretation, design, text and title.

The museum had not expected that communities would decide it was the museum’s responsibility to discuss colonialism and its impacts. Similarly, when a partner displayed its appropriately edited 14 minute film, the museum found – contrary to traditional museum thinking – that visitors stayed to watch it in full.

The funding enabled the museum to pay every participant fairly for their time, lived experience and skills. Partners shared copyright in their content and are free to use it in other contexts.

The museum sees its role as ‘platforming’ – being a platform from which communities can say what they want, how they want. The team was led by the museum’s senior curator of social practice and it considers that participatory practice is not additional to its curatorial approach – it is its curatorial approach.  

茶, चाय, Tea (Cha, Chai, Tea) showed the museum that a genuinely participatory model is effective in creating sustainable and meaningful community engagement and participatory practice, and that building money and time for it into core development costs means that full collaboration can begin from the start.

The success of this model for community-led curation is being evaluated and will inform future work across the museum. The museum is applying it to engage other local communities around contemporary collecting to reflect them.