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Abstract

Karutz's first journey in 1903 began with a sea voyage from Baku to Krasnovodsk on the Caspian Sea, followed by a rail journey through Krasnovodsk, Merv, Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent, and Kokand. During this expedition, he primarily collected marketable objects items such as bags, shoes, household goods, referred to as “tourism objects.”) These “everyday objects” signify the onset of a process of musealization, wherein elements of everyday culture were transferred to museums as exotic representations of a distant culture. His second trip in 1908 took him to the Turkmen and Kazakhs on the Mangyshlak Peninsula, where he collected and photographed both new and used objects from yurts, particularly carpets and horse-related items while also documenting Kazakh wedding ceremonies in detail. The donation of his collections to the Lübeck Museum of Ethnology, established in 1893, elevated these objects to exhibition status. During this transformation of the museum, the exhibits were contextualized within colonial-influenced discourses on ethnography. They serve as “lieux de mémoire,” or sites of cultural difference, but while simultaneously functioning as instruments of foreign attribution and exoticization . The current exhibition project employs contemporary curatorial approaches to critically examine on the provenance, contexts, and functions of these objects. A central principle of this initiative is the participatory involvement of community representatives from the countries of origin. In addition to archival and object analyses, the project will initiate oral history contributions , professional exchanges with local experts, and co-curatorial projects will be initiated in order to sustainably broaden the narrative spectrum and decentralize colonial interpretive authority.