My least favourite Museum in Paris is the Musee du quai Branly. Like many contemporary museums, it’s more front than interior (beautiful exotic garden, interesting building form) but the interior spaces are like a anthroposcopic perspective, reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s river metaphor in The Heart of Darkness. Architect Jean Nouvel has constructed a biomorphic internal environment and a spiralling entry path to disorientate you and separate you from the world outside. You pass through this dark tunnel to be delivered to an exhibition environment (of conventional vitrines) which feels smaller than the old Art Deco colonial museum out on the periphery. The predominant tone is black (get it?) and it’s claustrophobic. And antique – the most contemporary images are the mediocre group of Australian Aboriginal paintings on canvas, crowded in a tiny dark room in the far distant corner of the space. Their significant collection of bark paintings (formed by Karel Kupka) is squeezed into a glazed wall. Paintings are shown on their side to fit the mosaic – as in the case of this work by Dawidi. There’s no contemporary African Art, no sense of the present, a theatre of the “primitive” past. And contemporary Australian indigenous art is decor for the bookshop.

As you see, we finally found a label for the John Mawurndjul ceiling and pole in the shop, among other public notices. In his title “mardayin” is translatable as restricted (or “sacred”) places, object, or events, none of which (we would have thought) is appropriate to the hyper-secularism of the museum shop…