At a time of global rethinking of institutions, including museums and collections, Never Spoken Again (NSA) is an ambitious look into the creation of “Modern knowledge” through scientific and art collections. The exhibition considers histories, scientific gossip and myths of origin, of the gathering of objects and specimens, and traces their political, economic, cultural and ecological trajectories into their present prominence or disappearance.
 
There are many stories told in NSA: narratives that shed light on and question the ideologically-infused origins of collections and disciplines of knowledge.
 
NSA demonstrates that collections themselves say more than the objects within them. Collections have influenced the humanities, and disciplines of knowledge that are built around them. The history of how collections came together often reveals more about the social context, significance, and power structures of our past and of our times. For example, collections are often testimonies of a national project, colonial violence, rewritten over time with the addition of new objects, or the hiding of others.
 
This has inspired artists to investigate the history and cultural significance of collections and the act of collecting, and building knowledge structures. The artists in the exhibition tell these stories through installations, performances and audiovisual pieces that rehearse multiple variations of critical museography, heritage and other critical revisions of collection-making and extraction practices. In this way, NSA reveals many of the contingent and violent operations that gave birth to the modern classifications and institutions whose models we still live by. The exhibition aims to change the status of the alternative to being a constituent part of plural artistic, scientific, and exhibition histories.