Re‑imagining Museum Space between Cultural Containment

Abstract

I approach the rumah gambar; those Malay picture‑houses of the late nineteenth century, The rumah gambar; a travelling Malay picture‑house discussed by Simon Soon (2018), provides the hinge of the argument. More than a studio, it operated as an embryonic, community‑run museum: a porous room where photographs, maps, and panoramas were shown, discussed, and occasionally re‑labelled by local viewers. Tracing Lambert’s print from this egalitarian setting into rigid colonial vitrines, then into the speculative circuits of today’s art market, reveals an institutional relay in which intimate portraiture is repeatedly recast as public memory. Each metamorphosis leaves fissures where counter‑narratives can germinate. This paper traces the rumah gambar’s curatorial logic through its later incarnations: colonial museums that fixed the once‑fluid images behind glass; national archives that indexed them; contemporary art fairs that circulate them anew. The itinerary reveals containment not as a static enclosure but as a rhythm of pause and release. Images settle, accumulate meaning, then travel on. Understanding that rhythm, I argue, helps us rethink present debates over the museum’s social role; debates crystallised in the triadic theme Tutur‑Bhuwana‑Tuwuh. Tutur describes the picture‑house’s first utterance: a luminous tale told through cloth and light. Bhuwana marks the worldly journey of those tales across ports, plantations, and catalogues, where they gather new valuations and frictions. Tuwuh names the work still ahead: to revive the pavilion’s permeability in contemporary practice; inviting audiences to annotate, to disagree, to share custodianship; while acknowledging the colonial scaffolding that once framed the same images. Grounded in archival research, site visit, and small‑scale re‑enactments, this study proposes the rumah gambar as a model of flexible stewardship: a museum space light enough to travel, strong enough to hold memory, and open enough to let new voices re‑compose its glow.