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Month: May 2018

[translation underway]

29. May 2018

The contribution “Das Wissen der Anderen in der Provenienzforschung” by Andrea Scholz is currently being translated. Please check back in a few days.

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Anthropological Collections Not an apology but an amendment

22. May 2018

by Fritz W. Kramer

Sometimes it needs a sensation to draw public and media attention to a problem that otherwise only experts are concerned with. Emmanuel Macron succeeded in doing so when on November 27th 2017 in Ouagadoudou he declared his intention to create “the conditions for a temporary or permanent restitution of African heritage to Africa within the next five years”. The German Foreign Office, apparently under pressure to follow suit, more cautiously suggested it wanted “to strengthen cultural cooperation with Africa, especially by reappraising colonialism”, and the Minister for Culture and Media announced she would support “reappraising the provenance of cultural artefacts of colonial heritage in museums and collections (…) by establishing a new research focus” (Die Zeit, 26 April 2018). These statements instantly pulled anthropological museums out of their marginality – especially so in Berlin where moving the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art from the suburban district of Dahlem into the reconstructed Stadtschloss in the city centre had been in the making for some time, but under completely different premises. While the Humboldt Forum originally had been intended to demonstrate cosmopolitanism by featuring those “world cultures” that had inspired modern artists from Brücke to Beuys, now, against the backdrop of global migration, interest had shifted to the biography of objects, the ways in which artefacts of everyday and cult use had been stolen or otherwise acquired for the metropolises and there turned into ethnographic objects and works of art.

more “Anthropological Collections Not an apology but an amendment“

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Touching history Objects as witnesses, witnesses of objects

15. May 2018

by Leonor Faber-Jonker

In Berlin, history is tangible. It strikes me every time I visit the city. Empty plots, fading shop signs, and crumbling facades bear witness to the city’s tumultuous past. Monuments bear scars. The bronze reliefs of the Siegessäule (moved to its current location by the Nazis) are pockmarked with 1945 bullet holes. After Germany’s reunification, the tarnished Reichstag was rebuilt with a transparent dome, while inside, the graffiti of German soldiers was left in place. The echoes of a divided city, the devastation of war. A few weeks ago, on my way to the book presentation of Provenienzforschung zu ethnografischen Sammlungen der Kolonialzeit in Humboldt University, I had some time to spare and visited the Tränenpalast. Once, this benign-looking building had been an entrance point to the West from the Eastern half of the city. A free exhibition evokes the injustices of a city divided. Family heirlooms are on display. Treasured objects, carried in small suitcases by people fleeing the GDR. A set of tableware, buried in East-Germany in the 1950s, only to be dug up decades later, after the fall of the wall. And now, in the museum, viewed by visitors from all over the world, these highly personal mementoes carry new meanings as symbols of injustice and defiance.

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The museum of liberation An excursion into the early history of reconquest

8. May 2018

by Christian Kravagna

 

“Nothing is more galvanizing than the sense of a cultural past. This at least the intelligent presentation of African Art will supply to us.”

– Alain Locke, A Note on African Art, Opportunity, May 2, 1924

 

In his forward to the catalogue for the exhibition Blondiau – Theatre Arts Collection of Primitive African Art, which was shown at the New Art Circle in New York in 1927, the philosopher Alain Locke writes, in connection with a general characterization of the exhibited artworks and their significance for European modernism: “[…] it is curious to note that the American descendants of these African craftsmen have a strange deficiency in the arts of their ancestors.”[1] Like in previous essays of his, Locke postulates that African American visual arts lag behind achievements in music, dance and literature. While a synthesis of traditionally Black and eminently modern forms of expression has already succeeded in the latter genres, he writes, the fine arts have yet to see an interpretation of the art of their ancestors that corresponds to the modern Black experience. Locke understands the political significance of this engagement with African art to lie in the empowering affirmation “that the Negro is not a cultural foundling without his own inheritance.”[2] In emphatic disagreement with the widespread notion that Black Americans lost their African culture through centuries of enslavement, Locke argues that the African art which made such a vital contribution to the early 20thcentury European avant-garde could be taken up all the more legitimately by artists of the African diaspora and translated into an aesthetic expression of the new self-confidence of the New Negro Movement. Here he speaks unequivocally of the need to recapture the “creative originality” of African art.

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What do we know when we see? Or how can museums of “the world” renew cultural geographies? A view from the State Museums of Dresden

1. May 2018

by Monica Juneja

Museums that have built collections of “world cultures”, known to us today as either ethnological or the more encompassing, encyclopedic museums, have not ceased to be the subject of impassioned debates. Even a cursory glance through the diverse and insightful contributions to this blog give us a sense of the poles along which deliberations over the recent years have tended to oscillate, that is, between the poles of postcolonial critique and contemporary multiculturalism. Beyond these two, now well familiar binaries, further positions in the discussion seek to complicate our understanding of the issues at stake. One such argument is that we adopt “a worm’s eye view”, as Kavita Singh has done[i], a micro-perspective from the locality. Such a shift of scale would immediately draw our attention to the fact that not all communities in a given region or locality speak from the same position as the official voice of the nation-state.

more “What do we know when we see? Or how can museums of “the world” renew cultural geographies? A view from the State Museums of Dresden“

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Museum Collections in Motion – Programm

Museum Collections in Motion – Programm

Ein Artikel der digitalen Ausgabe der Süddeutschen Zeitung vom 09.07.2019

Museum Collections in Motion

Museum Collections in Motion

Museum Collections in Motion: Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters

International conference
July 15-17, 2019

A cooperation of
University of Cologne, Bremen University, the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum Cologne and boasblogs

Venue: Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum Cologne

Thematic Outline

The growing public awareness of colonial violence and historical injustice has put ethnographic collections into the spotlight of social and political debates. Museums are increasingly confronted with the challenge to decolonize their exhibition practices and examine their collection history for looted art, colonial entanglements, and systematic exclusions. The recent initiative of French President Macron to explore the modalities for restituting African objects from French collections has opened a new chapter in the debate on restitution and repatriation. While its actual implementation remains to be seen, the report by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy has set a world-wide agenda for decolonizing museum collections and academic research in the coming years.
In order to envision alternative futures for these collections and new forms of co-operation, this conference brings together activists, curators, experts, young researchers and scholars from around the world. Over three days we will re-visit museum collections and the debates and practices that have evolved around them, discuss ongoing work in the longue durée of colonial and postcolonial encounters and bring views from the Global North and South into intensive dialogue.
Convenors: Anna Brus, Larissa Förster, Michi Knecht, Ulrike Lindner, Nanette Snoep, Martin Zillinger

© Jonathan Fine

Our Authors

Jonas Bens
Felicity Bodenstein
Rainer F. Buschmann
Silvy Chakkalakal
Claus Deimel
Steffi de Jong
Johanna Di Blasi
Hansjörg Dilger
Knut Ebeling
Elizabeth Edwards
Ethnologie-Studierende der Uni Bayreuth
Leonor Faber-Jonker
Christian Feest
Anujah Fernando
Callum Fisher
Larissa Förster
Sarah Fründt
Lilli Hasche
Rainer Hatoum
Paola Ivanov
Monica Juneja
Claudia Jürgens
Michi Knecht
Karl-Heinz Kohl
Viola König
Fritz W. Kramer
Christian Kravagna
Ingrid Kummels
Oliver Lueb
Barpougouni Mardjoua
Achille Mbembe
Mark Münzel
Kwame Tua Opoku
Glenn Penny (1) (2)
Martin Porr
Andrea Scholz
Philipp Schorch
Erhard Schüttpelz (1) (2) (3)
Sven Schütze
Anna Seiderer
Bernhard Streck
Z. S. Strother
Luísa Valentini
Sarah van Beurden
Ulrich van Loyen
Friedrich von Bose
Margareta von Oswald (1) (2)
Cordula Weißköppel (1) (2)
Souad Zeineddine (1) (2)

Recent Posts

  • Relocating of the Blog 5. August 2019
  • “Bringing home our Gods” 14. July 2019
  • Palace Museums in the Cameroon Grassfields: Sites of Inclusion, Exclusion, and Alienation 14. July 2019
  • Challenges of rewriting the Khomani San/Bushman archive at Iziko Museums of South Africa 13. July 2019
  • The Crisis of Anthropological Museums from the Perspective of an Anthropology of Museums, and some Remarks on the Agency of Restitution Conceived as a Restitution of Agency 13. July 2019

Selected Media Reports

For a detailed documentation of the media coverage please visit the CARMAH Media Review on Museums
–––

Melissa Stern: An Exhibition About a Book That Rejuvenated an Indigenous Culture
(Hyperallergic, 14.03.2019)
Gedenkraum für koloniales Unrecht im Humboldt Forum gefordert
(Monopol, 03.01.2019)
Unterm Strich: Die Debatte um geraubte Kulturgüter aus der Kolonialzeit nimmtweiter Fahrt auf.
Interviewausschnitte mit M. Grütters
(taz.de, 03.01.2019)
Jason Farago: Artwork Taken From Africa, Returning to a Home Transformed
(NYTimes.com, 03.01.2019)
Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin: Alles aus Frankreich muss zurück nach Afrika
(NZZ.ch, 31.12.2018)
Werner Bloch: „Wir wollenkeine Almosen“
(ZEIT.de, 27.12.2018)
„Gegen jeglichen Verkauf“. Die Ethnologin Viola König kritisiert den kulturellen Mißbrauch indigener Objekte.
Interview von Tobias Timm
(ZEIT.de, 18.12.2018)
Sebastian Frenzel: 265.000 Objekte, 0 Provenienzforscher.
Interview mit Barbara Plankensteiner
(Monopol, 18.12.2018)
Alexander Herman: The eye of the beholder: How we return art to its rightful place.
(The Globe and Mail, 30.11.2018)
Should looted colonial art be returned?
(Podcast, theartnewspaper.com, 14.12.2018)
Rebekka Habermas: Was schuldenwirkolonialen Objekten?
(Vortrag, Einsteinforum, 29.11.2018)
Alexander Herman: The eye of the beholder: How we return art to its rightful place.
(The Globe and Mail, 30.11.2018)
Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy: The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics
Tristram Hunt, Hartmut Dorgerloh, Nicholas Thomas: Restitution Report: Museum directors respond
(The Art Newspaper, 27.11.2018)
BeninDialogueGroup: Museum für Kunst aus Benin geplant
(Stiftung Preussicher Kulturbesitz, 22.10.2018)
Catherine Hickley: Berlin’s Humboldt Forum: how its director plans to confront German colonial past
(The Art Newspaper, 17.10.2018)
Peer Teuwsen: Wir müssen nicht auf den nächsten Krieg warten, wir können die Sachen jetzt zurückgeben“. Interview with Bénédicte Savoy
(NZZ.de, 15.10.2018)
Peter Burghardt: ‚Zweckfrei fördern’.
(sueddeutsche.de, 14.10.2018)
Haroon Siddique: Not everything was looted’: British Museum to fight critics
(TheGuardian.com, 12.10.2018)
Graham Bowley: A new museum opens old wounds in Germany
(NewYorkTimes.com, 12.10.2018)
Jörg Häntzschel und Andreas Zielcke: Eine Räuberbande will Beweise. An interview with the lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck about the legal aspects of restitution.
(sueddeutsche.de, 11.10.2018)
Achilles Mbembe: Restitution ist nicht genug.
(FAZ.net, 09.10.2018)
Jörg Häntzschel: Aufbruch vertagt
(Süddeutsche.de, 21.09.2018)
Andreas Kilb: Wie kolonialistisch sind Naturkundemuseen?
(FAZ.net, 13.09.2018)
John Eligon: The Big Hole in Germany’s Nazi Reckoning? Its Colonial History
(NewYorkTimes.com, 11.09.2018)
Richard Dören: Wem gehört die Bibel von Hendrik Witbooi?
(FAZ.net, 06.09.2018)
Christoph Schmälzle: Ist das Kunst, oder muss das wieder weg?
(FAZ.net, 16.08.2018)
Karl-Heinz Kohl: So schnell restituieren die Preußen nicht
(FAZ.net, 17.05.2018)
Viola König: Zeigt endlich alles! Warum nur ein radikales Konzept das Humboldt Forum noch retten kann
(Zeit.de, 25.04.2018)
Jörg Häntzschel: Wie ein ethnologischer Kindergarten

(Süddeutsche Zeitung, 21.03.2018)
Cody Delistraty: The Fraught Future of the Ethnographic Museum
(frieze.com, 28.02.2018)
Casey Haughin: Why museum professionals need to talk about Black Panther
(The Hopkins Exhibitionist, 22.02.2018)
Nicola Kuhn: Berlins verfluchte Schätze

(Tagesspiegel.de, 13.02.2018)

Archives

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