Paper short abstract:

This papers discusses the postcolonial exhibition "What We See" about a so called "archive of vanishing races", its aesthetic and discursive strategies of displaying disquiet of ethnography's anthropometric past, and its adaptation to the exhibiting institutions' structures in Africa and Europe.

Paper long abstract:

The exhibition "What We See. Images, Voices and Versioning" offers a critical perspective on a so called "archive of vanishing races", i. e. casts, measures, photos and audio recordings, assembled by the German artist Hans Lichtenecker 1931 in then South-West Africa. Its main goal is not only to come to terms with an often neglected chapter of ethnography's past, namely the entangled histories of anthropology and colonialism and the physical and ethical abuses that went along with it, but to excavate and rehabilitate the recorded voices that make up a considerable part of Lichtenecker's collection.

Initially curated by Annette Hoffmann for the IZIKO Slave Lodge in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2009, the exhibition came to Europe via the Basler Afrika Bibliographien in Switzerland and was then shown at the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna, Austria, thus marking the first time that the "messages to Germany" that some of the Namibians had spoken into Lichtenecker's phonograph reached a German speaking audience.

Considering the power-laden dynamics between artefact, curators, collecting and exhibiting institutions, and audiences, this paper discusses the aesthetic and discursive strategies that the exhibition adopted in order to display disquiet of the discipline's anthropometric past as well as of the racist and colonial ideologies that legitimated it. How to unveil ethnography's abuses without perpetuating them by, for example, exhibiting the artefact of these abuses? Moreover, how did the exhibition adapt to the different histories of the exhibiting institutions and their specific needs of critical remembering?