“The Entangled Museum” is an experimental play that seeks to raise questions about the status of museums as a site of knowledge production and their function as a gatekeeper of legitimate knowledge. Set in the British Museum, the beginnings of the play originated as a commissioned text responding to London-based artist Noah Angell’s project “Ghost Stories of the British Museum”, which documents the rich internal folklore of haunted spaces, restless objects and inexplicable occurrences that has long circulated privately among museum staff.

Choosing the form of a fictive play fragment to enable dialogue between the museum’s ghosts, this text sparked a process of further research and writing, partly prompted by Angell’s invitation to keep going. Drawing on Angell’s interviews and correspondence with current and former museum staff, as well as undertaking her own research in the historical and culturally specific areas touched on by the narrative, Cotter’s play’s brings together fictive and historical characters from different time periods and cultures, whose worldviews challenge the museum’s role as a leading institution for the production of global knowledge. Each has an entangled relationship to the museum, having worked there or been a philanthropic supporter during their lifetime, or being tied there energetically due to the possession of one’s cultural objects. The Entangled Museum intervenes playfully yet seriously in discourses surrounding the ethics and role of museums, the rise of metaphysical questions in Quantum Physics and the relative space for the unknowable within contemporary knowledge production.

Mixing fact and fiction, the play’s subject matter straddles many formal disciplines, manifest in the various displays of the museum. Drawing on ancient Egyptian manuscripts and British 19^th century society reports, among other diverse sources, the play’s many, and often contradictory, paradigms and at times archaic use of language seek to put familiar theoretical frameworks slightly out of joint. At times theorists are cited or evoked to establish this interrelatedness. Anecdotal and dryly humorous, the play intervenes playfully yet seriously in such discourses as Critical Race studies, Museum studies, Historiography, intersectional and gender studies, Quantum physics and art discourse.