In late April, as the coronavirus outbreak continued its inexorable spread, a museum in Los Angeles put out a remarkable call. It asked communities in the western United States – the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains and the west coast – to help "identify and preserve items of historical and cultural significance during the Covid-19 pandemic".
The Autry Museum explained that it saw history as “ever-present” and wanted to preserve “this moment”. Meanwhile, similar initiatives were launched by several other museums and historical societies across America. From New York city, badly hit by the virus, to Bozeman in Montana, which is not, curators have begun to try and record an unprecedented event and its impact on the human psyche, creativity and connectedness.
It is a worthy endeavour, but there are some questions about the timing. How valid is it to capture a moment in time even as we live through it? Is it not premature to seek to depict an event while it is under way? Does distance – in time – provide necessary perspective? If history is the study of the past and a museum an institution that conserves artefacts that illuminate the past, should pandemic-era collections not wait for the pandemic to be over? Really, can one even begin to tell a story before it has ended?
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Some of these concerns are already being raised by scholars. Stanford University’s Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Kennedy stresses that the goal of Covid-themed museums and collections should be to inform people, “not just tickling their fancy”. To be successful, he says, they need to “provide context and enable future visitors to understand the tenor and temper of the times, including inequities, racial and otherwise”.
Fair enough, but is that even possible right now? The effects of the twin burdens of disease and bigotry are yet to be wholly understood in relation to certain groups, such as native Americans and east Asians in the US and poor migrant workers in India. With museums seeking everyone's memories (and everyday objects), there is a risk that everything becomes an artefact and the largest group of contributors are the usual suspects, people who are not "documentarily inarticulate", in the words of American cultural studies professor Thomas J Schlereth.
At this point in the coronavirus crisis, we do not even know why Covid-19 appears deadlier in the US and Europe than in Asia and Africa, so it is a moot point that any museum collection would be able to properly explore the intersection of material culture from the pandemic and its larger constellations of meaning for humankind.
It could be argued that the decade it took to put together different perspectives for the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York provided the depth required for such an emotionally freighted exercise. So too the very many decades before the first Holocaust Museum came into being. But it may be perilous too, as Mr Kennedy warns, in “waiting too long” to memorialise the past.
The Partition Museum in Amritsar is a case in point. It opened its doors in 2016, nearly 70 years after the partition of India, the birth of Pakistan and the largest mass migration in human history. Established as a result of an initiative driven by British Indian author Kishwar Desai, it brought together family objects, tales of separation across the border and personal accounts of trauma and tremendous resolve, as well as art defined by partition.
The museum, the first of its kind, fills as it says, “a void”. It calls itself a “people’s museum” and while it is considered a success and a template for other such collections, the gap between its establishment and the event it memorialises is rather too long. In the intervening period, many storytellers we should have heard may have passed and countless artefacts lost, all of which would help shine a light on one of the defining moments in the history of the subcontinent.
The fact that Indian and Pakistani official institutions were unable or unwilling, for the best part of a century, to preserve material relics in order to tell a meaningful story of partition is lamentable. But the rush in the US to build pandemic-era collections is also troubling, albeit in a different way.
The precipitate move to preserve every bit of life during the pandemic may point to a worrying tendency diagnosed by the renowned historian David Lowenthal some 30 years ago.
Writing in Perspecta, the peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Yale School of Architecture, he lamented "the mania for memorabilia…the rampant cult of preservation…[the] wider modern preoccupation with the past". New films continually reprise older ones, he wrote, the search for roots swamps the genealogical archives and reverence is lavished on oral histories. It all comes down to "disappointed expectations of progress and looming fears of decline and impending catastrophe", the professor added, and this perennial nostalgia means that unlike our ancestors, who saved "only grand heroic treasures; today everything…is saved".
Also read: Art that captures the pandemic
The argument is clear. Lowenthal, who wrote the groundbreaking book The Past is a Foreign Country in 1985, led a strand of cultural-historical thought that believed in liberating the present from obsessively salvaged – and saleable – relics of the past. The implication is that the modern cult of preservation may sometimes actually prevent us from contemplating the imperishable, non-physical elements of our shared experience.
So, the pandemic era may best be considered as a museum piece in the post-pandemic moment. That will be the time when uniquely patterned masks, Zoom invitations, toilet paper mark-ups, wildlife in city spaces, quarantine poems, lockdown love stories and other such curiosities can become objects for contemplation.
CHINESE GRAND PRIX STARTING GRID
1st row
Sebastian Vettel (Ferrari)
Kimi Raikkonen (Ferrari)
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Valtteri Bottas (Mercedes-GP)
Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes-GP)
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Max Verstappen (Red Bull Racing)
Daniel Ricciardo (Red Bull Racing)
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Tearful appearance
Chancellor Rachel Reeves set markets on edge as she appeared visibly distraught in parliament on Wednesday.
Legislative setbacks for the government have blown a new hole in the budgetary calculations at a time when the deficit is stubbornly large and the economy is struggling to grow.
She appeared with Keir Starmer on Thursday and the pair embraced, but he had failed to give her his backing as she cried a day earlier.
A spokesman said her upset demeanour was due to a personal matter.
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
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The Settlers
Director: Louis Theroux
Starring: Daniella Weiss, Ari Abramowitz
Rating: 5/5
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Engine: 3.4-litre twin-turbo V6 plus supplementary electric motor
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Tonight's Chat on The National
Tonight's Chat is a series of online conversations on The National. The series features a diverse range of celebrities, politicians and business leaders from around the Arab world.
Tonight’s Chat host Ricardo Karam is a renowned author and broadcaster who has previously interviewed Bill Gates, Carlos Ghosn, Andre Agassi and the late Zaha Hadid, among others.
Intellectually curious and thought-provoking, Tonight’s Chat moves the conversation forward.
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
Temple numbers
Expected completion: 2022
Height: 24 meters
Ground floor banquet hall: 370 square metres to accommodate about 750 people
Ground floor multipurpose hall: 92 square metres for up to 200 people
First floor main Prayer Hall: 465 square metres to hold 1,500 people at a time
First floor terrace areas: 2,30 square metres
Temple will be spread over 6,900 square metres
Structure includes two basements, ground and first floor
UPI facts
More than 2.2 million Indian tourists arrived in UAE in 2023
More than 3.5 million Indians reside in UAE
Indian tourists can make purchases in UAE using rupee accounts in India through QR-code-based UPI real-time payment systems
Indian residents in UAE can use their non-resident NRO and NRE accounts held in Indian banks linked to a UAE mobile number for UPI transactions
Sanju
Produced: Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Rajkumar Hirani
Director: Rajkumar Hirani
Cast: Ranbir Kapoor, Vicky Kaushal, Paresh Rawal, Anushka Sharma, Manish’s Koirala, Dia Mirza, Sonam Kapoor, Jim Sarbh, Boman Irani
Rating: 3.5 stars
RESULT
Leeds United 1 Manchester City 1
Leeds: Rodrigo (59')
Man City: Sterling (17')
Man of the Match: Rodrigo Moreno (Leeds)
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How the bonus system works
The two riders are among several riders in the UAE to receive the top payment of £10,000 under the Thank You Fund of £16 million (Dh80m), which was announced in conjunction with Deliveroo's £8 billion (Dh40bn) stock market listing earlier this year.
The £10,000 (Dh50,000) payment is made to those riders who have completed the highest number of orders in each market.
There are also riders who will receive payments of £1,000 (Dh5,000) and £500 (Dh2,500).
All riders who have worked with Deliveroo for at least one year and completed 2,000 orders will receive £200 (Dh1,000), the company said when it announced the scheme.
Fitness problems in men's tennis
Andy Murray - hip
Novak Djokovic - elbow
Roger Federer - back
Stan Wawrinka - knee
Kei Nishikori - wrist
Marin Cilic - adductor
What is Reform?
Reform is a right-wing, populist party led by Nigel Farage, a former MEP who won a seat in the House of Commons last year at his eighth attempt and a prominent figure in the campaign for the UK to leave the European Union.
It was founded in 2018 and originally called the Brexit Party.
Many of its members previously belonged to UKIP or the mainstream Conservatives.
After Brexit took place, the party focused on the reformation of British democracy.
Former Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson became its first MP after defecting in March 2024.
The party gained support from Elon Musk, and had hoped the tech billionaire would make a £100m donation. However, Mr Musk changed his mind and called for Mr Farage to step down as leader in a row involving the US tycoon's support for far-right figurehead Tommy Robinson who is in prison for contempt of court.
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Engine: 2.0-litre 4cyl turbo
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Torque: 400Nm at 1,750-4,000rpm
Transmission: 8-speed auto
Fuel consumption: 9.1L/100km
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Ferrari 12Cilindri specs
Engine: naturally aspirated 6.5-liter V12
Power: 819hp
Torque: 678Nm at 7,250rpm
Price: From Dh1,700,000
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KILLING OF QASSEM SULEIMANI
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
Zayed Sustainability Prize
