By Theresa Rézeau
Today is International Museum Day, and this year's theme, “Museums Uniting a Divided World,” feels especially relevant in a world increasingly shaped by conflict, noise, political fragmentation, and cultural tension.
In many ways, museums stand in quiet opposition to this atmosphere. They remain among the few public spaces where people from entirely different backgrounds still gather before the same objects, histories, and ideas - not to win arguments or perform identities, but to look, reflect, and encounter something beyond themselves.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Tower of Babel, housed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, offers a striking visual reflection on this tension between unity and division. Painted in oil on panel, the work depicts humanity’s attempt to build a tower reaching heaven. The structure appears monumental and collectively constructed, yet beneath its ambition lies collapse. According to the biblical story, languages were confused, communication fractured, and the project failed.
Centuries later, the painting still feels unsettlingly contemporary.
Bruegel’s tower can be read as a meditation on civilisation itself: humanity’s endless desire to build, organise, and elevate itself while struggling to truly understand one another. It captures both collective achievement and collective fragmentation. Thousands appear united physically in a shared vision, yet divided spiritually and linguistically beneath it.
In many ways, museums now attempt the opposite task.
Where Babel symbolised fragmentation, museums attempt reconnection. They gather fragments of civilisations, cultures, religions, and histories into shared spaces where dialogue becomes possible again. Within a single museum, visitors may encounter sacred manuscripts, African sculpture, Islamic geometry, Renaissance altarpieces, Asian ceramics, Indigenous artefacts, contemporary installations - objects from worlds separated by centuries and geography, now brought into conversation under one roof.
Museums remind us that cultures are both rooted and interconnected: shaped within particular histories, peoples, and traditions, yet continually influenced through exchange, migration, trade, conflict, and encounter. Artistic influence has always crossed borders. Techniques travelled trade routes. Religious imagery evolved through contact between civilisations. Museums quietly reveal that human culture has never developed in complete isolation.
Yet museums themselves are not neutral spaces. Increasingly, they have become sites of debate over restitution, representation, identity, power, and historical interpretation. Some institutions risk becoming participants in division rather than places that help societies think beyond it. The challenge is not to erase difference, but to create spaces where complexity, disagreement, memory, and cultural distinctiveness can coexist without collapsing into hostility.
At a time when digital culture rewards outrage, speed, and simplification, museums ask something radically different: attention, patience, and presence. They slow the very act of looking.
This is why museums still matter so deeply in divided societies. They preserve not only objects, but memory, complexity, contradiction, and human inheritance. They allow us to encounter histories larger than ourselves and recognise that today’s anxieties are rarely new.
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London remains one of my favourite examples. Walking through its galleries carries a visitor across centuries and continents in a single afternoon.
Reflecting on International Museum Day at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Sacred art, textiles, sculpture, design, architecture, fashion, and material culture reveal not only aesthetic achievement, but the relationships between cultures, histories, and human experience. In this sense, museums become more than repositories of objects - they become spaces where people encounter both difference and connection simultaneously.
Ultimately, museums are not only about preservation. They are about relationship.
They remind us that human beings have always left traces of themselves through images, objects, rituals, and acts of creation. They allow strangers to stand quietly beside one another before the same work and share a moment of reflection, grief, wonder, or recognition.
In Pieter Bruegel’s The Tower of Babel, humanity appears united in construction yet divided in understanding. Perhaps museums endure because they continue attempting the opposite: bringing fractured histories, cultures, and voices back into conversation again.
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