Uncomfortable Knowledges and Transformative Learning : Reimagining the Museum in the Art of Gustafsson&Haapoja

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Uncomfortable Knowledges and Transformative Learning : Reimagining the Museum in the Art of Gustafsson&Haapoja © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published version Kosonen, Heidi; Turunen, Johanna; Koistinen, Aino-Kaisa Kosonen, H., Turunen, J., & Koistinen, A.-K. (2024). Uncomfortable Knowledges and Transformative Learning : Reimagining the Museum in the Art of Gustafsson&Haapoja. Critical Arts, Early online. https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2024.2316302 2024 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcrc20 Critical Arts South-North Cultural and Media Studies ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rcrc20 Uncomfortable Knowledges and Transformative Learning: Reimagining the Museum in the Art of Gustafsson&Haapoja Heidi Kosonen, Johanna Turunen & Aino-Kaisa Koistinen To cite this article: Heidi Kosonen, Johanna Turunen & Aino-Kaisa Koistinen (19 Feb 2024): Uncomfortable Knowledges and Transformative Learning: Reimagining the Museum in the Art of Gustafsson&Haapoja, Critical Arts, DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2024.2316302 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2024.2316302 © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 19 Feb 2024. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Uncomfortable Knowledges and Transformative Learning: Reimagining the Museum in the Art of Gustafsson&Haapoja Heidi Kosonen a , Johanna Turunen a and Aino-Kaisa Koistinen b a Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland; b University of the Arts Helsinki Research Institute, Helsinki, Finland ABSTRACT Destructive human action is causing interconnected ecological and social challenges on an unprecedented scale. Scholars and artists from varied fields have critically expressed their concern about this in their research and practice. In this article, we interrogate the transformative potential of critically engaged art by analysing the work of the Finnish artist duo Gustafsson&Haapoja, a collaboration between writer Laura Gustafsson and visual artist Terike Haapoja. Gustafsson&Haapoja’s work focuses on the intersecting human exceptionalist, racist, imperialist, patriarchal, and capitalist histories of violence towards nonhuman animals and dehumanised humans. These histories often provoke uncomfortable affects. As such, they can be challenging to confront. To account for this difficulty, we approach Gustafsson&Haapoja’s art through the idea of transformative learning, a process designed to shake established thinking and behavioural patterns. We investigate how Gustafsson&Haapoja’s art—and art more generally—could function as a transformative learning resource and enable sudden ruptures in hegemonic cultural norms, privileges, and power positions. We focus on how transformative learning emerges through central features in Gustafsson&Haapoja’s work: (1) their investigation and reimagination of the museum, an institution historically tied to notions of humanity and human action; and (2) their critical dissection of the complex relationship between Western-centric conceptualisations of humanity and its “others.” The article is based on a theoretical discussion and a qualitative analysis of works, exhibitions, and texts published by Gustafsson&Haapoja’s Museum of Becoming (2020–21) as well as an interview with the artists. KEYWORDS Museum; art; transformative learning; uncomfortable knowledges; affect; violence; human exceptionalism; colonialism Introduction Destructive human action is currently causing interconnected ecological and social challenges on an unprecedented scale. A move towards a more socially and ecologically sustainable society is not only a matter of technology, innovation, or science, but requires a cultural transformation, meaning “a large-scale change in the shared knowledges, © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. CONTACT Heidi Kosonen [email protected] CRITICAL ARTS https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2024.2316302 lifestyles, traditions, beliefs, morals, laws, customs, values, institutions, and worldviews, and how they are practiced in everyday life” (Koistinen et al. 2023, 232). In this article, we suggest that art can promote such change by enabling transformative ways of knowing and learning. We interrogate this transformative potential in the art of Gustafsson&Haapoja, a collaboration between two Finnish artists, writer Laura Gustafsson and visual artist Terike Haapoja. We have chosen to focus on Gustafsson&Haapoja’s artwork because it addresses pressing sociocultural issues, such as the intersecting human exceptionalist, racist, imperialist, patriarchal, and capitalist histories of violence directed to nonhuman animals and dehumanised humans—including women, colonial subjects, and “other others” (see Ahmed 2004, e.g. 4–12, 24–25). Their work is driven by a desire to approach the intertwining histories of human and nonhuman lifeforms from a non-anthropocentric perspective (GH 2020). It is also marked by a critical take on the Western scientific, philosophical, and religious discourses in which humanity has been defined (see also Koistinen et al. 2023). As a collaborative effort of a writer and a visual artist, Gustafsson&Haapoja’s art relies not only on visual but also on verbal (and aural) forms of expression. Their immersive artworks combine video and image material with text in ways that are prone to evoke thoughts, feelings, and associations—including cognitive dissonance, denial, and other uncomfortable affects. Moreover, Gustafsson&Haapoja’s work deals with the question of knowledge production and its inherent ethics. The artists themselves identify the “cerebral” nature of their work as the most prominent element of their collaboration (GH 2020). They refer here to the fact that their art tends to be heavily centred around language and utilises scientific knowledge (GH 2020). It is Gustafsson&Haapoja’s (1) outspoken desire to engage in sociocultural debates while challenging existing knowledge structures and (2) tendency to play with scientific and artistic ways of producing knowledge, making surprising connections and associations, that motivated us to approach their art through the idea of transformative learning (Mezirow 2018). Transformative learning refers to learning processes that can shake established thinking, knowing, and accustomed behavioural patterns, enabling sudden ruptures in hegemonic cultural norms, privileges, and power positions. A key element in this sort of learning is facing the uncomfortable feelings and cognitive dissonance invoked by the acknowledgement and critical reflection of one’s prejudices and presuppositions (Matikainen 2022). Although we discuss the concept of learning, we do not seek to measure learning outcomes or develop concrete pedagogical tools. Instead, we offer a theoretical and analytical contemplation on art’s potential to invoke transformative learning that can inspire societal, ecological, and cultural change—with Gustafsson&Haapoja’s art as our case study. We are especially interested in the ways that Gustafsson&Haapoja’s artistic choices and the affective and cognitive affordances of their art could challenge collectively held sociocultural truths. In other words, we focus on how Gustafsson&Haapoja’s art foregrounds certain affective and cognitive responses related to human exceptionalist and violent practices, and how it may participate in modifying societal, ecological, and cultural realities. We focus on the Museum of Becoming (henceforth MoB), a tripartite art installation displayed in Helsinki Art Museum (HAM), Finland, between 2 June 2020 and 17 January 2021. MoB consisted of the reinstallation of The Museum of Nonhumanity (MoN, 2016), an award2 H. KOSONEN ET AL. winning imaginary museum exploring the intersections between the exploitation of nonhuman animals and the dehumanisation of certain human beings; and two new entities, Remnants (2020), a curated collection of art objects from the HAM collection; and Becoming (2020), a three-hour multichannel video work dealing with possibilities for ethical coexistence of humans and nonhumans on this planet. We take a cultural studies approach to Gustaffson&Haapoja’s work, understanding art as embedded in and in interaction with its broader cultural context (e.g. hooks 1995; Williams 1985, 14). Our analysis is grounded in intersectional feminist perspectives and decolonial and posthumanist theories. The article is based on a qualitative analysis of the two parts of the exhibition that included original artworks by Gustafsson&Haapoja (MoN and Becoming, visited in August 2020) and an interview with the artists on 15 December 2020 (henceforth GH 2020). Our analysis is structured around two central features in Gustafsson&Haapoja’s work: (1) their non-anthropocentric investigation and reimagination of the museum, an institution historically tied to notions of humanity and human action; (2) their critical, intersectional dissection of the complex relationships between Western-centric conceptualisation of humanity and the dehumanisation of the multitudes of human and animal others who are constructed as its counterpart. The museum of becoming Before embarking on the analysis, we offer a short description of MoB. The idea of the museum has been a consistent, repeating theme in Gustafsson&Haapoja’s work; the fascination with the museum stems from their first artistic collaboration. As Gustafsson describes, they were initially united by an aspiration to explore alternatives to human exceptionalist thinking and “quickly got the idea that the history of other animal species [besides humans] ought to be told from a non-anthropocentric perspective, and that an installation of some kind ought to be established for this history” 1 (GH 2020). The idea resulted in the 2013 “ethnographic museum,” The Museum of the History of Cattle, exhibiting the shared history of cattle and humans from a “bovine perspective.” This was followed by the 2016 installation MoN, and eventually the MoB, which extends these considerations of what a museum can be. Each of the aforementioned installations was accompanied by a multimodal book (Gustafsson and Haapoja 2015, 2019, 2020). These books not only repeat the themes, texts, and visual imagery of the installations but add theoretical and poetic contemplations (including images) on their themes. Additionally, both artists have published several essays and articles on the theoretical underpinnings of their artistic practice (e.g. Gustafsson 2020; Haapoja 2019, 2021, 2023). At HAM, MoB consisted of three parts that were displayed in three separate spaces. When entering MoB, the visitors first find themselves in MoN, a ten-channel, seventyminute video installation, the only part of the exhibition that has been exhibited previously as an independent entity. MoN deals with the techniques of dehumanisation, or rather animalisation (see Haapoja 2021), which are used to justify the violence toward nonhuman animals as well as some human animals. The exhibit is constructed around 1 All citations have been translated from Finnish to English by Kosonen. CRITICAL ARTS 3 twelve affectively loaded concepts: “person,” “potentia,” “monster,” “resource,” “boundary,” “purity,” “disgust,” “anima,” “tender,” “distance,” “animal,” and “display” (Figure 1). Each concept’s violent history is “excavated” (see Foucault 1972) in a threeto tenminute-long video installation, in slideshow-like presentations that consist of textual fragments from a wide range of sources (e.g. encyclopaedia entries, etymological excerpts, historical records, policy documents, and media and social media commentaries) and visual imagery, like photographs, blueprints, and historical illustrations. Beyond the videos projected onto multiple screens, the exhibition space of MoB is rather minimalist, consisting of scaffolding covered by white sheets and not much else. Behind the sheets are scattered wooden boxes, on top of which regular natural history museum objects, like taxidermy animal remains and skeletons, are displayed in vitrines, visible as shadows on the white sheets (Figure 2). Simple seats invite the visitors to sit down to watch the projections. Each thematic section in the video has a distinctive colour scheme that effectively tints the entire space covered by the white cloths. The exhibition is accompanied by sombre, mournful instrumental soundscape, which, together with the changing colours, contributes to the affective atmosphere of the installation space (see Sumartojo and Pink 2019). A more spacious installation room is occupied by Becoming, a three-hour, threechannel video work offering a meditation on how humans could better coexist with one another and with other lifeforms. The video consists of interviews with scholars, artists, activists, and other individuals such as children, who Gustafsson&Haapoja have found essential for reimagining human societies and human–nature relationships from a more sustainable and ethical viewpoint. Questions—including how to live, how to listen, how to love, and how to die—create a central focus of the interviews. The interviewees could decide which of thirty-one questions they answered, and were encouraged to create questions of their own (GH 2020). The video is pieced together from headshot Figure 1. As one excavated concept in MoN, Gustafsson&Haapoja study “person” through debating the object–person dichotomy. Photo © Terike Haapoja. Courtesy of the artists. 4 H. KOSONEN ET AL. interview clips, closeups of interviewees’ embodied gestures, and atmospheric clips of human and natural environments, with children playing, a river flowing, and treetops swaying in the wind. As the artists recount, the long video itself is not intended to be viewed in one go: it could be accessed on Vimeo through a QR code presented at the exhibition. The video is exhibited on three huge screens at the one end of a large yet mostly empty museum space, with three circular seats positioned near the screens, where the visitors can either sit or lie down to experience the video that fills the space with imagery and a soundscape of speech, nature sounds, and music. The back end of the space includes the names and information of the individuals interviewed for the video, as well as printed pages from Bud Book, the publication expanding the themes of the video work. In this sense, the exhibition provides transmedial access points (see Klastrup and Tosca 2014) that expand Becoming beyond the exhibition space: a physical copy of Bud Book can be purchased and read whenever and wherever one wishes. One option to experience the exhibition is offered by a map designed by queer feminist curatorial duo nynnyt (“sissies”), offering a path to approach the themes of Becoming. The four exercises on the map invite children, but also “their adults,” to sense the sensory stimuli in the museum space. Tasks include: “What is the most silent sound you can hear? Listen to it. What does it tell you?” or “Listen to yourself. What do you sound like? What kinds of things do you contain? What kind of things can you do?” As a multimedia and multimodal installation that engages visitors via cognitive and sensual modes of expression—with a guided map encouraging visitors to pay close attention to the affects, emotions, and experiences it evokes—MoB offers myriad opportunities for invoking transformative learning. In what follows, we first describe our theoretical approaches, after which we delve deeper into the analysis of Gustafsson&Haapoja’s art by focusing on what we deem the most relevant parts of MoB for transformative learning. Figure 2. The shadow figures in the MoN. Photo © Johanna Turunen. CRITICAL ARTS 5 Uncomfortable knowledges and transformative learning: theoretical approaches Addressing the themes dominating Gustafsson&Haapoja’s art can be an unpleasant and deeply uncomfortable process both individually and collectively. First, it means challenging intertwining notions and internalised attitudes about valuable life, rooted into hierarchical configurations between human and other life (Chen 2012). Recognising this interconnectedness between the exploitation of nature and nonhuman animals, and the oppression and dehumanisation of certain human beings, Sanna Karkulehto et al. (2016, 3) note: the cultural meanings given to nonhuman animals often reflect and coincide with the attitudes and assumptions held toward repressed or marginalized groups, whereby the treatment of animals and nonhumans is connected to the treatment of the humans who are, in varying contexts, viewed as lesser, weaker, subordinate, or substandard. Second, addressing these themes means challenging the “cultural archive” (James 1999; Said 2003): a deeply normative, patriarchal, colonialist, White, and human exceptionalist, yet often “unacknowledged reservoir of knowledge and feeling” (Wekker 2016, 3). The cultural archive tends to manifest in “almost gut-instinct type cultural reactions, norms, and biases that powerfully govern the way we react to different cultural incentives” (Turunen 2021, 25). It represents the emotional and cognitive structures of a society— the unwritten, yet strikingly precise behavioural rules that everyone within a given society is socialised into. The binary moral opposition between humanity and animality is one dimension of this archive (e.g. Ko and Ko 2020). The archive also has to do with affects, emotions, and cognitive dissonances. For instance, sociologists Eviatar Zerubavel (2002) and Kari Norgaard (2011) speak of “the social organization of denial,” in which the social norms of attention, conversation, and emotion do not allow for constructive encounters with harsh social realities, like genocides or the climate crisis, and the uncomfortable feelings and affects—ranging from fear and helplessness to guilt—they often cause. Our interest lies in Gustafsson&Haapoja’s art’s capability to invite people to become aware of the often-denied histories and practices of violence and inspire them to act against the prevailing norms—two principles inherent to transformative learning. The idea of transformative learning is based on three foundational principles (e.g. Kegan 2018; Matikainen 2022; Mezirow 2018). First, creating and assigning meanings is an essential part of human life (see also Hall 1997, 61). Second, a person can become more aware of these meaning-making processes, and the cultural and political norms and ideologies that drive their actions. Third, thereby one gains tools to oppose, unlearn, or resist hegemonic interpretive frames and knowledges. This third stage, transformation, can often be achieved only through an uncomfortable process, or rupture, of coming to terms with one’s own innate assumptions and attitudes, sociocultural privileges, and positions of power. If successful, transformative learning may change collective notions of normal or desired behaviour in a society (Ziehe 2018, 206). It has been argued that the feeling of discomfort may be “productively unsettling” in teaching and learning, meaning that uncomfortable feelings have potential to challenge fixed epistemologies, thus inspiring new knowledges (e.g. Hyvärinen, Koistinen, and 6 H. KOSONEN ET AL. Koivunen 2021; Juvonen 2006). Feminist scholars, such as Katariina Kyrölä (2018), have also argued that feeling uncomfortable is sometimes important in the learning process. We argue that productive unsettlement, or learning through discomfort, is an incremental part of transformative learning, and art can serve as a space for it (see Hyvärinen, Koistinen, and Koivunen 2021, 12). Art, therefore, can have transformative potential. Cultural studies commonly understands art as a powerful form of meaning-making (e.g. Hall 1997; hooks 1995; Lähdesmäki et al. 2022). This connects art to transformative learning. Art’s potential to evoke affective responses, which may lead to activism, has been widely recognised (e.g. Hiltunen, Saresma, and Sääskilahti 2020; Simoniti 2018). So has its potential to engender transformative ways of knowing (e.g. Eisner 2008). The transformative capacity of art, art education, and art-based research has been connected to their power to enrich human imagination regarding the experiences of others, including the engendering and learning of empathy (e.g. Lähdesmäki and Koistinen 2021; Leavy 2017; Stout 1999), and opening “the door for multiple forms of knowing” (Eisner 2008, 5). Elliot W. Eisner posits that art influences knowledge production in three ways: first, by evoking nuanced understanding by emphasising phenomena’s situatedness; second, by generating a “kind of empathy that makes action possible”; and third, offering “a fresh perspective so that our old habits of mind do not dominate our reactions with stock responses” (2008, 10–11). Art can serve as a space where different knowledges and experiences can be safely encountered (Lähdesmäki and Koistinen 2021; on safe spaces, see Gurian 2010; Kyrölä 2018). As it helps people to grasp the experiences of others, art has the capacity to foreground situated knowledges based on for example gendered, classed, or racialised experiences (Lähdesmäki and Koistinen 2021; see also Haraway 1988). Furthermore, imagining of the experiences of others, leading to empathic or sympathetic responses, may extend to nonhuman beings (Koistinen et al. 2023; Weik von Mossner 2017). These factors therefore make art suitable for engaging in transformative learning, including dismantling anthropocentric perspectives. The transformative potential of a museum in the state of unravelling The museum is a loaded platform for criticising the human exceptionalist tendencies of contemporary societies. Ethnographic and natural history museums have contributed to the moral binary of humanity versus animality by dividing the world between viewers (the White, Western, upper-class—and human—audiences) and viewed (the many human and animal others, plants, artefacts, and other others that have been objectified in their exhibits). The knowledges constructed on this binary have had extensive and long-lasting effects. In MoN, Gustafsson&Haapoja attack the reality created through this violent, elitist, patriarchal, racist, and human exceptionalist history of the museum institution (e.g. Abungu 2018; Bal 1992; Levitt 2015; Mignolo 2011) head on. As they explain in their interview, the artists find the notion of the museum as an institution of knowledge and truth intriguing. They discuss their habitual negotiation with institutions and institutionalised knowledge from non-anthropocentric and artistic perspectives: Our fascination with institutions stems from […] the way their truth value is constructed by believing in them, their authority built by use of authority, and the truths they tell built by a collective faith on their truthfulness. All these institutions are social constructions […] And through this [recognition of their constructed nature] we can also question their epistemic CRITICAL ARTS 7 introduced the term “existential imperialism” (2017, 2446, see also Turunen 2019) to refer to how colonial and capitalist webs of exploiting nature’s resources have come to threaten all life on earth. There is no use denying that the endless pursuit of profit in the Global North poses a universal and interspecies existential threat through its role in environmental and social crises such as increasingly frequent and intense storms, heat waves and drought, rising sea levels and melting glaciers, warming oceans, and the accelerating sixth mass extinction. Due to the elusive nature of these crises, and the uncomfortable emotions involved in realising one’s responsibility in such profound forms of destruction, the threats caused by human actions are often dismissed, downplayed, or denied. In this context of deep ecological crisis, philosopher Timothy Morton calls for “art that does not make people think […] but rather that walks us through an inner space that is hard to traverse” (2013, 184). Art is, of course, not free of all these harmful structures, and can participate in the destruction of our planet (e.g. Brennan et al. 2019; Koistinen et al. 2023; see also Parikka 2018). However, as Morton suggests, art and artistic thinking can be transformative; they can offer space for questioning oppressive structures, imagining, and inspiring more sustainable futures and practices. In this article, we have argued that art may serve the sociocultural and ecological transformation required in environmental and social crises by setting in motion the process of transformative learning. As such, our article offers a novel way of negotiating the role of art in the so-called Anthropocene. Moving from informative to transformative learning often demands facing the uncomfortable feelings and cognitive dissonance invoked by the acknowledgement of difficult truths, including one’s own prejudices and presuppositions (Matikainen 2022; Mezirow 2018). The complex experiences produced—or invited— through art, such as Gustafsson&Haapoja’s work, can be productively unsettling (Hyvärinen, Koistinen, and Koivunen 2021; Juvonen 2006). As we have proposed, the strength of Gustafsson&Haapoja’s approach is that they do not offer ready-made answers. Instead, their critical, highly atmospheric, and affective works create a space for complex contemplation, highlighting the capabilities of artistic knowledge production to confront uncomfortable realities. In their art, Gustafsson&Haapoja bring disparate histories of violence and their associated epistemologies together but leave visitors to draw their own conclusions—thereby encouraging visitors to become an active participant in the construction of knowledge. In doing so, Gustafsson&- Haapoja intentionally break the established rules of museum exhibitions, and both make and invite unforeseen connections between seemingly incongruent epistemologies— such as the remarkable similarity in the hateful discourses on the Red women as wolves, and the Tutsi as cockroaches. The multimodal and fragmented aesthetics and poetics of their art emphasise the knowledge-rich and fragmentary nature of the uncomfortable genealogies of violence toward both humans and nonhuman animals, whereas the atmospheric, immersive qualities of their exhibitions facilitate a safe space for even difficult emotions and contemplations. Thus, rather than being a material display of artefacts, the museums constructed by Gustafsson&Haapoja constitute a gathering space for critical thinking (Sterling 2020, 197), unsettling audiences in many ways. Building on Robert Kegan (2018), we argue that Gustafsson&Haapoja’s artwork moves beyond informative learning—the practice of increasing knowledge and skills—into the realm of the transformative. Transformative learning transgresses knowledges in surprising ways, causing ruptures and mutations in 14 H. KOSONEN ET AL. existing constructions of truth; Gustafsson&Haapoja accomplish this in ways that we as researchers and visitors felt evocative and powerful. For these reasons, we suggest that art like Gustafsson&Haapoja’s can make people aware of the collectively organised denial of difficult truths (the second premise of transformative learning) and decide to act against it (the third premise). As bell hooks (1990) argues, knowledge that seeks to challenge established (Western) sociocultural truths is always inherently unsafe—since by challenging the cultural archive it also challenges the fundamental fabric of the given society. The social norms of attention, conversation, and emotion do not usually create opportunities to constructively encounter harsh social realities or their root causes. However, art can offer avenues for such encounters with uncomfortable topics and themes. While it is beyond the scope of the present article to verify any effects that art may have on museumgoers besides ourselves, the authors, our discussion suggests that art and art museums should be utilised more robustly in transformative learning. 3 Although transformative learning can occur in response to a single catalytic event—like a critical art exhibition—that forces individuals to reevaluate their essential values and priorities, the process is more commonly long, complex, and cumulative (e.g. Mezirow 2018). Future research should examine the experiences of museumgoers, including this longer temporal dimension that transformative learning usually demands. Finally, the effects of art are complex and difficult to foresee. If museums want to harness the power of art for transformative learning, they need pedagogical tools attuned to encountering uncomfortable knowledges. Although museums can attempt to keep the transformative learning process sparked by art aflame, they do not have a long-term relationship with their visitors. This makes sustained pedagogical approaches very difficult, a crucial factor to remember when developing tools for studying the experiences of transformative learning among art audiences and museum visitors. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). Funding This work was supported by Academy of Finland [grant number 330620], [grant number 340650]; Jyväskylän Yliopisto; Koneen Säätiö [grant number 202009043], [grant number 202204408]; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 435-2019-0691]. ORCID Heidi (S.) Kosonen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2931-878X Johanna Turunen http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6188-4282 Aino-Kaisa Koistinen http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8970-4714 3 Studying behavioural or other similar effects would require the analysis of visitor experiences, and a different study frame. While no visitor experiences were systematically gathered from the exhibitions studied here, Gustafsson&Haapoja’s interviews give clues about transformative learning through visitor feedback, including a shift from animal-based diet to a vegan one. CRITICAL ARTS 15 References Abungu, G. O. 2018. “Connected by History, Divided by Reality. Eliminating Suspicion and Promoting Cooperation Between African and European Museums.” In Museum Cooperation Between Africa and Europe: A New Field for Museum Studies, edited by Thomas L. M. Meyer, and R. Schwere, 25–41. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Ahmed, S. 2004. Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge. Åsberg, C., and R. 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