Museums with colonial inheritances have long served as instruments for organising and displaying knowledge, shaping narratives about civilisation and progress through their spatial hierarchies of display and storage. This essay explores how the visibility or invisibility of collections in such institutions reflects and perpetuates colonial power structures. Focusing on three London case studies—the Wellcome Collection, the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, and the V&A Storehouse—it examines how different configurations of display and storage engage with contemporary calls for transparency and decolonisation.

Museums as Colonial Instruments

Since the Enlightenment, European museums have embodied systems of classification that ranked societies from ‘advanced’ to ‘primitive’.¹ They materialised imperial hierarchies by displaying ethnographic objects as evidence of Western superiority and rationality.² The very act of collecting and displaying non-Western artefacts—detached from their original contexts—was a mode of controlling both bodies and knowledge. According to Alice Procter, the museum itself is a ‘colonialist, imperialist fantasy … that the whole world can be neatly catalogued, contained in a single building’.³

Through curatorial decisions on what to show and how to interpret it, museums construct narratives that sustain this colonial legacy. Display and storage are not neutral categories: the visible exhibition represents selective interpretation, while storage conceals the remainder of the archive. Both spaces, as Swati Chattopadhyay argues, share ‘an ontology of colonial dislocation’, manifesting the displacement and possession at the core of empire.⁴

Display and Storage as Sites of Power

Films such as Les Statues Meurent Aussi (1953)⁵ and You Hide Me (1970)⁶ expose the violence of museological display and concealment. By isolating objects from living cultures, museums render them aesthetic curiosities for Western consumption, ‘a prison of masks, jewellery, robes, statuettes’ hidden from view.⁷ Storage thus extends colonial control through invisibility: nearly 90% of museum collections remain inaccessible to the public.⁸ These unseen artefacts become ‘hoarded capital’, material assets through which Western museums assert cultural authority and generate value.⁹

The tension between display and storage, therefore, mirrors broader struggles over visibility, authorship, and access. Decisions on what to exhibit or withhold are inseparable from the hierarchies established during empire. Curatorial practices that claim neutrality often replicate those same structures of dominance, determining which stories are told and which remain hidden.

Making Invisible: The Wellcome Collection

The Wellcome Collection epitomises how colonial narratives are embedded in display. Founded from Sir Henry Wellcome’s global collecting during the British Empire, it was reorganised in 2007 around the permanent exhibition Medicine Man. This show assembled artefacts related to health and healing ‘through the lens of a single person, Henry Wellcome’.¹⁰ Objects from diverse cultures were categorised by medical theme rather than by origin, stripped of context, and re-presented as trophies of one man’s curiosity.

Despite architectural renovations intended to increase accessibility, in 2022, the exhibition was closed indefinitely for its ‘racist, sexist and ableist’ approach.¹¹ Most artefacts were moved to their storage location in Swindon. The choice of invisibility—removing the problematic display without yet providing an alternative—was framed as an ethical pause. Yet, as critics noted, simply concealing colonial objects neither restores context nor enables restitution.

For Wellcome’s curators, invisibility was a means to avoid perpetuating colonial narratives; however, unless followed by repatriation or reinterpretation, it risks reinforcing the same erasures.

Making Visible: The Petrie Museum

The Petrie Museum, by contrast, reveals the complexities of partial visibility. Created from the excavations of Flinders Petrie and the bequest of Amelia Edwards to University College London in 1892, the museum originated as a teaching resource deeply embedded in imperial archaeology. Its displays followed Petrie’s taxonomic logic—grouping objects by typology and chronology rather than cultural significance. While pedagogically coherent, this organisation reinforced colonial hierarchies of knowledge and authority.¹²

Today, the Petrie Museum occupies a repurposed stable on Malet Place. Its modest architecture restricts both visibility and flexibility: only 8,000 of 80,000 objects can be displayed. Nevertheless, recent curatorial projects seek greater transparency. The 2019 re-design of the entrance gallery introduced labels addressing Petrie’s involvement in eugenics and the colonial conditions of excavation. Displays now highlight neglected figures such as Ali Suefi, an Egyptian overseer, and Violette Lafleur, who safeguarded the collection during WWII.

Initiatives such as ‘Hidden Hands’¹³ by Steven Quirke attach the names of Egyptian workers to specific artefacts, restoring agency to those previously unacknowledged. The ‘Sudan Living Cultures’ project similarly collaborates with London’s Sudanese community to reframe the museum’s dual heritage and recognise how indigenous knowledge can be seen within existing Western collections. Although constrained by space and bureaucracy, these acts of naming and reinterpretation exemplify micro-decolonial practices within a colonial institution.

Blurring Boundaries: The V&A Storehouse

The newly opened V&A Storehouse (2025) in Hackney represents an architectural and conceptual experiment in transparency. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, it embodies the idea of visitable storage—a hybrid between gallery and archive where all objects are potentially visible. By ‘flipping the usual progression from public to private’, as Liz Diller explains, visitors can see conservation work and explore vast reserves once hidden from view.¹⁴

Glass walls, open shelving, and cross-sectional displays replace the opacity of the traditional museum. Every six months, the configuration changes, granting different artefacts visibility. This design literally materialises transparency, aligning architectural form with curatorial ethics. Yet full visibility does not automatically equal decolonisation: what remains to be addressed is the interpretation of these objects and the narratives surrounding their colonial acquisition.

Conclusion

Across these three institutions, the relationship between display and storage functions as both metaphor and mechanism of colonial power. Invisibility — whether physical or curatorial — has historically legitimised Western ownership and authority over other cultures’ material heritage. The Wellcome Collection’s retreat into storage shows the limits of erasure as a strategy; the Petrie Museum demonstrates how visibility, transparency, and community collaboration can begin to unsettle inherited hierarchies; and the V&A Storehouse pushes the logic of visibility to its architectural extreme.

Ultimately, the challenge for museums with colonial inheritances lies not merely in making objects visible but in revealing the conditions of their visibility — how space, design, and curatorial practice continue to mediate access and meaning. Only by confronting the intertwined histories of collection, concealment, and display can museums move towards genuine decolonial transparency.