Programming the Sacred: The Contradictions of Ancestral Knowledges in the Museum

On the third and final day of ‘Ancestral Knowledges: My Grandmother Is My School’, the symposium’s exploration into the ways artists engage with ancestral knowledge focused on themes of ancestral mapping, meditation, models for Indigenous AI, oral traditions, displacement and the deconstruction of implicitly Western epistemologies.

The programme’s visual, aural and relational methodologies were dedicated to the aspirations of decolonial discourse, considering ways to reconceptualise our relationships across the entangled temporalities of human and more-than-human life, and treating what we inherit as active and intimate in the present moment. Contributions featured practices from a range of global contexts, focusing primarily on Indigenous knowledge, rematriation (the restoration of living relationships to stolen land and culture), community systems of aid and knowledge, and organising forms of resistance against colonial erasure.

As museums move rhetorically toward assimilating the lexicons of activism and Indigenous sovereignty, a question arises: how are these ethically oppositional frameworks, which challenge the institution’s hierarchical and operational foundations, being repurposed as its programming and content? In this process we, as participants and organisers, must on some level suspend a full view of this structural contradiction, in a way that ultimately sustains the evasion of institutional change or accountability. This evasion is often built upon the very realities of hierarchy, overwork and precarity it rhetorically disavows.

The day began with Laura Burns’ workshop ‘A Ground to Walk On’, an ancestral mapping exercise offered as a way to access a sense of belonging to our ancestors – known and unknown. Burns shared how her journey started with a disconnection from her ancestors (in the UK) that felt like an abstract ‘knock at the door’, until a quietly pivotal moment in Lancashire where the ‘river interrupted [her]’. This opened a channel to what she discerned as ‘stone women’ – ancestral figures existing in ‘vertical time’ and held directly in the land – within a site she subsequently discovered was related to a brutal history of witch hunts. For over seven years, Burns returned to the riverbank, receiving insights encoded and channelled through rearranging stones.

The exercise began with a guided meditation across spatial-temporal planes of awareness as we sat around configurations of stones, shells, fabrics and clay sculptures. Burns asked us to feel the immensity of the thousands of ancestors behind us as ‘hearts that beat long enough for us to arrive’, before we then proceeded to a non-linear, spatial mapping exercise using yarn, paper, stones, objects and drawing. This practice invited an acknowledgement of relations, family and kin across a spectrum of potential life experiences, she noted, as our ‘systemic field’, that could include the displaced and invisible victims and perpetrators of violence, proposing it as a model for what we know or cannot know about our own lineages.

This non-judgemental framework offered a creative model for systemic repair. Yet, within the broader context of a programme that predominantly featured artists drawing from Indigenous knowledge outside the imperial canon, the implicit universalism of ‘ancestral’ paired with a predominantly ongoing Indigenous struggle prompted a critical question: what is the relationship between a universally available concept of ‘ancestral’ and the specific political inheritance of ‘indigeneity’, an ancestral tie forged through ongoing colonial violence and subjugation? In other words, while the idea of ancestry might seem to belong to everyone, it takes on very different meanings when linked to Indigenous identities, which are shaped by histories of colonisation and resistance.

This remained implicit as we continued into the ‘Dreaming Session’, introduced by Marleen Boschen (Adjunct Curator, Art and Ecology) as ‘a way to connect to ancestors to learn about resistance and wayfinding’ beyond the sleeping state. Here, the stakes of ancestral connection were invoked in a range of technologies for cultural survival and, notably, resistance to establishing paradigms of artificial intelligence. The session featured four performances framed as ‘offerings’: experiments in receptive engagement that challenged typical dynamics between the audience and performer. The term ‘offering’ felt indicative of a deliberate code-switching within the museum’s mode of address, denoting an attempt to adopt the sentiment and lexicon of ancestral reciprocity.

The first performance was Zayaan Khan’s video work My grandmother is disappointed sage is the only plant she can smell 2025, projected across three screens with an intimate, subtitled narration lucidly spoken by the artist, who later joined in the Q&A virtually from South Africa. In the narration, she recounted the prolonged trauma of her first birth in 2020, a 36-hour labour where a midwife told her to ‘stop the birth’ part-way through, leading to a moment of such excruciating pain that she felt she was ‘waiting to die’. In this exasperated state, incapacitated and exhausted in soul, she navigated towards her ancestors, seeking a memory, ‘even if it was not [hers]’, for strength. She framed this ancestral dialogue through metaphor, describing how ‘storytelling and knowledge is carried by seeds’.

Following this, Phoebe Boswell performed a live iteration of her wider project A Tree Says (In These Boughs The World Rustles) 2023. Originally installed in 2023 within Orleans House Gallery, London, and amongst the trees of its surrounding woodland, the work includes a polyphonic soundscape featuring archived recordings from Boswell’s interviews with a group of elders. At Tate Modern, she opened by reading from Hermann Hesse’s ‘Trees are Sanctuaries’ (1920), on the history held in a tree trunk. This led into a soundscape of portals, which she described as ‘layering voice to arise new meaning in the spaces between’. Emanating from speakers around the room, the project’s torrent of whispered voices featured intergenerational questions while screens showed her drawings of trees and figures, creating an immersive and charged dialogue rooted in listening and speculative memory.

Suzanne Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta), joining online, presented a dense lecture-performance on her collaborative project (with Alisha B. Wormsley) Cosmologyscape 2024–ongoing which invokes dreaming as a collective, ancestral technology for listening to the past and reimagining the future. Drawing on Lakota epistemology, she conferred that ‘creating from dreams requires ethics and protection’, positing that ethical technology must shift from ‘extraction to relation’, and building an ontology that includes the non-human: stones, animals and the land. Central to this technical framework was the Lakota recognition of ‘non-conscious cognition [dreaming] in decision making’, a stark contrast to a Western epistemology that ‘prioritises written thought’. Kite offered a re-imagining of technology as an inter-relational system that involves a direct and constant consideration of the land, body and cosmos.

Closing the session, Tara Al Dughaither presented a live set comprising a sonic dialogue with an aged vinyl record from southern Iraq. Never having lived in Iraq, her impressions of it are dreamed through memories, shared by her mother and grandmother, of gardens, community and the distant joy of the past. She described the vinyl as being ‘like a body’ with its own grooves and imperfections, while the soundtrack’s vocalist sang about the pain of separateness. The artist mentioned she has deliberately refrained from trying to trace the record’s exact origin, preferring to keep that connection speculative and sonic. Using a synthesiser, she warped the recording, stretching the haunting voice of the male vocalist into ethereal, temporally distant echoes. Meanwhile Al Dughaither layered on her own, responding voice, eliciting its own reach across time and space as a form of live ecstatic feedback.

The final session of the day featured Xiaolu Guo and Sara Shin exploring postcolonial feminist theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha’s expansive body of work and her notion of women’s creative speech as a form of enchantment. Guo recounted how Trinh had recorded herself telling her grandmother’s story in a whisper for her film What about China? 2022 as a way into speaking about how narrative structures of East Asian epistemologies are non-human centred, and reveal an image or a story spatially akin to the unravelling of scrolls. She stated that the Daoist and Buddhist notion of perspective as a ‘travelling force’ is in direct contrast to Renaissance art’s human-centred perspective. In the context of discussions about her publication Grandma’s Story (2025), Trinh described her grandmother who, as a teenager facing an arranged marriage, read her life path in the landscape as a premonition: upon seeing a mountain, the yellow of the sea and a white peacock, she knew ‘her life now belonged to someone else’.

The conference concluded with an evening performance offsite at Gasworks, by artist Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien. Within her lucid, galactic installation of intricate, suspended tapestries featuring ethereal designs of uterine forms with embroidery, stones and vegetal forms, she performed a sound bath to create an ‘interscalar’ experience. This final, wordless offering of direct, bodily resonance provided a moment of somatic relief from the informational overload; the day’s profound overwhelm was symptomatic of an unsustainable leap between slower systems of knowledge and the contradictory structures of the institution that packages them.

The day’s journey considered the liveness of ancestral presence across interconnected scales – the personal, the more-than-human and the technological – all held within an inherently political frame. The speculative and spiritual leaps taken by artists serve a complex, dual purpose: they are explorations of systems of renewal, while also becoming functional components within the institution’s intensive programmatic performance. This dynamic raises an unresolved question: what is transformed, and what is lost, when slow, relational and often sacred ways of knowing are translated into back-to-back programming? Ultimately, on a structural level, this format allows the institution to embrace the idea of expansiveness and ethical engagement through the modus of art. It becomes a form of institutional spiritual bypass, a way to metabolise the practical accountabilities this knowledge demands by offering artists and art as the primary, and often sole, interface for that encounter.