Disobedient Objects: Towards a Museum Insurgency

Assembling a wide range of protest objects produced since the late 1970s, Disobedient Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2014–15) aimed to present the expansive material culture of social movements from a global perspective while charting a ‘people’s history of art and design from below’. This article examines the critical intentions behind the exhibition, compares it to other recent large-scale exhibitions on activist art and situates it within a broader field of museum activism, demonstrating how it displayed not only a collection of disobedient objects but also a model for disobedient curating by directing institutional resources towards ongoing movements and campaigns.