Whose Museum is a transnational collaborative project that has involved a number of arts practitioners and cultural producers. The initial collection was formed during a cross-Canada tour with the bands Collapsing Opposites & Bible Belts in 2008, with the help of a clown named Dr. Storey, who solicited donations from concert-goers. Since then the collection has continued to expand and has been widely exhibited, traversing bars, galleries, sushi restaurants, shop windows, artist studios and backyards. The Collection has been made available to visiting artists for still-life drawing sessions, and has been featured in a music video, show posters, paintings, photographs, album art, and magazines.
Whose Museum views its Permanent Collection as permeable and in a constant state of flux. Items from the Collection have been outsourced to various artists (posing as conservators) who perform alterations to the Collection as a form of pragmatic preservation needed to keep each item’s narrative alive. These alterations come via collaborations with the original donors and often bring conversations with the past into the present for future generations, as an endeavour for posterity’s sake.
In 2010 Whose Museum completed a major storage initiative, which saw the collection housed using archivally sound, museum quality methods. Since then the collection has been temporarily dispersed across national borders between Canada, U.K., Sweden, Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands. Additionally a website has been set up, and contains an online database which is continually updated to allow all items in the collection to be viewed by anyone with access to the Internet.
