Curating the conflict: Everyday Objects and the challenge of representing the Troubles
by Allan LEONARD
18 March 2026
An online panel discussion hosted by The Peace Museum in Bradford brought together museum professionals, academics, and heritage practitioners to explore how the conflict in and about Northern Ireland has been represented in exhibitions. Chaired by Dr Louise Purbrick of the Royal College of Art, the conversation introduced the museum’s current special exhibition, Everyday Objects Transformed by the Conflict, developed by Healing Through Remembering (HTR). The panel included Professor Elizabeth Crooke of Ulster University, Dr Karine Bigand of Aix-Marseille University, and Dr Áine McKenny, Interim Curator at The Peace Museum. Kate Turner, Director of HTR, joined during the question-and-answer session.
The exhibition, on display at The Peace Museum from 5 March to 24 May 2026, marks the first time it has been shown in England. Across more than 50 venues since its pilot in 2012 — including community centres, churches, public libraries, and university campuses — the exhibition has drawn hundreds of thousands of visitors. Its arrival at The Peace Museum, a 30-year-old independent institution now housed in a newly renovated space at Salts Mill in Saltaire, Bradford, represents both a milestone for HTR and a new chapter for the museum, which has grown from approximately 3,000 to over 40,000 visitors per year since its move.
The challenges of representing violent histories
Professor Crooke opened the substantive discussion by reflecting on the particular difficulties that heritage organisations face when addressing violent and contested histories. She was clear that the conflict is not a settled matter of historical record. “This is not about the past,” she said. “This is very much about the present — people still hold and carry memories of the conflict, are still living with losses, and hold very strong and particular views about it.”
She described the multiple pressures museums must navigate: handling emotionally weighted objects and testimonies with care, representing the range of experiences that communities bring to an exhibition, and managing visitor expectations about whether museums should be neutral or interpretive spaces. Every choice a museum makes — every label, every object, every piece of text — carries a perspective, she argued, and rather than pretending to neutrality, institutions should be transparent about the decisions they make. “Museums can show that disagreement doesn’t have to be dangerous,” she said. “It can be part of that approach to understanding.”
On the question of who tells the story, Crooke was equally emphatic. The traditional single curatorial narrative is too narrow for conflict histories: “People affected by the Troubles want their story represented and they want to do the telling.” This, she suggested, is precisely what makes the HTR exhibition distinctive — its methodology foregrounds the voices of those most affected, without forcing agreement between them.
An exhibition born of process, not product
Dr Bigand, who first encountered the exhibition as an intern with HTR in 2011, outlined four features that distinguish Everyday Objects Transformed by the Conflict from conventional exhibition practice.
The first is its bottom-up origins. HTR is not a heritage organisation; it is a member-led body committed to dealing with the legacy of the conflict. Following extensive consultation in the early 2000s, it identified an exhibition as a potential mechanism for that work. Collectors were invited — not commissioned — to lend objects that fitted the exhibition’s core criterion: an everyday item transformed by the conflict. Each collector then wrote their own label. “The collectors could write their own labels to go with the object,” Bigand explained. “They had the choice of words, the choice of phrasing.” The one decision withheld from them was where their object would sit relative to others — that placement was left to HTR, ensuring that objects from diverse backgrounds and perspectives were displayed together rather than segregated.
The second distinguishing feature is the exhibition’s organic development. Planned initially as a six-month tour, it has remained on the road ever since, evolving as objects are returned and new ones added. “It’s not at all the same exhibition as it was 14 years ago,” Bigand said. “You can go back to it and it will be different every time.” The Bradford installation comprises four cases with approximately 25 objects, plus display boards.
Third is the deliberate choice of non-museum venues. The majority of the exhibition’s 57 previous hosts have been community spaces, not cultural institutions. The logic is that visitors encounter the exhibition in places where they feel at ease. Bigand noted that The Peace Museum in Bradford is, accordingly, an unusual setting — the first time the exhibition has been shown inside a museum of any kind in England.
The fourth feature is the integration of visitor feedback. Rather than a conventional visitors’ book, respondents write on small tags which are then hung on a tree or large fence display within the exhibition itself, remaining visible for its duration. “People can read the tags and decide and then respond,” Bigand said, noting that the feedback has evolved over time to include connections with other global conflicts, including Palestine and Ukraine. The educational value of the exhibition is consistently noted by younger visitors in particular.
The Peace Museum’s perspective
Dr McKenny explained that her decision to bring the exhibition to Bradford was rooted in her doctoral research, which examined how women’s experiences of the conflict had been represented — or failed to be represented — in exhibitions. HTR’s people-first methodology stood out. “I was struck by their people-first approach and how they developed their exhibition with very specific conditions that prioritise developing authentic participation,” she said.
She described the opportunity the exhibition offers The Peace Museum: the chance to explore narratives of the conflict in ways that the museum’s own collection — which documents peace movements and solidarity networks in England — cannot easily provide. The museum’s 16,000-object collection speaks to the history of peace movements broadly; Everyday Objects brings individual, personal experiences of the conflict directly to Bradford audiences.
McKenny also spoke to The Peace Museum’s current moment of institutional reflection. Since relocating to Salts Mill in 2024, the museum has been undergoing an organisational development project supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, asking communities what they need from a peace museum, what peace means to them, and how the institution should evolve. “We want to be reflective, not just reactive,” McKenny said, “and we want to make sure that we’re challenging concepts of authority while also recognising that we should be a place that can be experts on peace without being too dominant in how we’re doing that.”
Methodology, feedback and the question of difficult objects
During the question-and-answer session, Kate Turner addressed the practicalities of the exhibition’s development with frankness. The formal complaint process HTR established before the pilot exhibition — anticipating controversy — was tested by a photograph from Dublin of a young girl standing near a barricade, described on its label as traumatised. The complaints came, Turner said, but none were formally escalated. Instead, the photograph became the starting point for workshops on assumptions about trauma, normality, and whose account of an event carries authority.
“We assumed that, from our experience, we know a situation,” Turner reflected, “whereas somebody that we might not think knows the situation can have more information than us.” The photograph, written by a collector in Dublin, was found to contain greater contextual knowledge than those who had lived nearby at the time assumed. It is, Turner suggested, a lesson with wider relevance in the present day.
Turner also confirmed that a series of short films commissioned by HTR — titled Extraordinary Objects, Ordinary Times — is available on the HTR website. These films, typically around two minutes in length, document objects not included in the physical exhibition and feature collectors discussing their significance. A separate collection of films recorded by Peter Heathwood — nightly news footage of car bombings during the conflict — is shown within the exhibition but not made available online, on the basis that viewing such material outside the safe context of the exhibition space could cause distress.
Transformation and the future of museum practice
Professor Crooke returned to the theme of transformation in the closing stages of the discussion — noting that the exhibition’s title points not only to the effect of conflict on ordinary objects but to the profound changes in museum practice over the past two to three decades. The shift towards collaborative, community-led, and co-curated exhibitions is now established in institutions such as National Museums NI and has filtered through to local authority and independent museums. HTR, she suggested, played a formative role in this shift. “Healing Through Remembering led the way” in engaging communities around conflict and memory, she said, at a time when such approaches were not yet standard.
Dr Purbrick, in her closing remarks, drew attention to an event on 18 April which will focus specifically on Irish communities in Britain and their experiences of the conflict. The event is open to all.
The project, Everyday Objects Transformed by the Conflict, was funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Ireland, with support from the Royal College of Art and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Everyday Objects Transformed by the Conflict is on display at The Peace Museum, 3rd Floor, Salts Mill, Saltaire, BD18 3LA, Thursday to Sunday, 10am to 4pm, until 24 May 2026. Admission is free. Further information is available at www.healingthroughremembering.org and www.peacemuseum.org.uk.