Curatorial Justice and Community Engagement Beyond the Gallery in Musée comme chez soi/Museum aan huis

The Brussels-based Musée d’Ixelles faced a dilemma when it was to undergo extensive renovations beginning in 2019: how could the museum remain relevant to the local community when the space itself would be physically inaccessible? In the resulting participatory initiative, Musée comme chez soi/Museum aan huis, museum staff invited residents in the neighborhoods surrounding the museum to bring works of art into their homes and present them to the broader public over a weekend. Anchored in critical museum studies, queer and decolonial museologies, and visual studies, this article situates Musée comme chez soi (MCCS) at the intersection of community engagement and social justice. Using on-site observational research, visual analyses, and museum publications, I argue that a vision of curatorial justice emerges in the form and content of this initiative that recasts the relationship between the institution and local communities, via the dual gesture of physically displacing works of art from the museum into domestic spaces and symbolically redistributing institutional authority from curators to Ixelles residents. Residents develop multisensory presentational strategies that break from traditional modes of viewing in galleries, thus rendering artworks accessible to a broader public and creating the conditions for ambivalent encounters beyond the museum’s influence.