Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on the history of artists' interventions into anthropological collections over the past forty years, laying out the findings of a long-term study of artists’ critical and instrumental engagement with ethnographic museums.

Paper long abstract:

Reflecting on the history of artist’s interventions into anthropological collections in the past forty years shows an outline of the changing strategies and precedents for those responding to repatriations today. From counter appropriations and violent acts of reversal to conceptual play and collaboration—this introductory talk will lay out the findings of a long-term study of artists’ critical and instrumental engagement with ethnographic museums. It will also analyse a range of specific works, presenting the case studies of a current ERC project on artists' roles in repatriations from museums to stakeholder communities.

Paper short abstract:

This intervention examines the relationship between art and ethnography-archiving in galleries and museums in West Africa. It focuses on how image-making is a mode for reconstituting the past. I am concerned with how in post-revolutionary societies stories of radical change are erased or told.

Paper long abstract:

In November 2023 Nuku Studio’s Center for Photographic Research and Practice in Tamale, Ghana opened the exhibition "Routes of Rebellion," an exhibition of my films and audio-visual media. The works-- many of them collaborative-- explore how revolutionaries transform our perception. The works draw on the aesthetics of anti-imperial cultural and political movements from the 1970s through 2000s, tracing the paths that radical artists, athletes, and thinkers travel in confronting power. I use images and sound to challenge narrative conventions and experiment with storytelling by blending documentary, fiction, music video, and experimental techniques. I will discuss this exhibition as a way to blend the ethnography and aesthetic.

https://www.nukustudio.org/media-centre-content/routes-of-rebellion-launches-at-Nuku-Studio-and-Red-Clay

Paper short abstract:

European museums have increasingly become stages for subversive performances that articulate diverse aesthetic and political claims. This paper explores how these performances, situated at the intersection of radical political and artistic expression, challenge norms within museum spaces.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past decade, large European museums have increasingly become stages for subversive performances that articulate diverse aesthetic and political claims. These performances, often situated at the intersection of radical political and artistic expression, challenge established norms of conduct within museum spaces, initially designated for passive cultural collecting, aesthetic consumption and contemplation.

Several common elements bring together these "creative intrusions," which can be thought of as a form of artistic intervention. Firstly, there is a subversive interaction with the museum space itself, disrupting its initial purpose and generating social controversy. This controversy extends into broader debates within and outside the art world, addressing issues such as the colonial provenance of African artifacts in European museums and their restitution, the regimes of women’s representation, based on patriarchal objectification, as well as the relationship between museums and fossil fuel industries. Secondly, these performances share similarities in semiotic operations and employed performative strategies based on open-ended and future-oriented scripts.

For analytical purposes, these cases can be categorized into three groups based on the political claims articulated by the protagonists and the objects of their critique: feminist performances, postcolonial performances, and ecological performances. Building on anthropological theories of museums and exhibitions, this paper seeks to provide a socio-anthropological interpretation of the social meaning of these uninvited intrusions to reflect on how these performances contribute to the redefinition of the conception of the Western museum.

Paper short abstract:

Plundered objects have served as a so-called representation of subdued populations displayed in European ethnographic museums. However, laying an artistic gaze on them unveils and reveals new interpretations and may encourage museums to rethink their displaying of ethnographic collections.

Paper long abstract:

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, looted objects were used by European colonial governments to justify and intensify their explorative missions in colonialized territories. It was also a means to expand the collections of newly-built ethnographic museums and display the power of the colonizing nations. Indeed, the intensification of the colonial waves coincided with the opening of ethnographic museums in European capitals.

Fictive and imaginary populations were invented through the decontextualization of stolen items. Ethnographic museums embodied the fabrication of a colonial narrative about African history, art, cultures and societies. Indeed, physical modifications were made to some of the items looted upon their arrival in Europe.

If one considers that, through the deterritorialization they underwent, the looted objects became mutant objects, that process continues thanks to an artistic intervention, stepping away from the scientific and political visions as well as the hierarchy imposed by museums, the artistic contribution opens up new ways to approach controversial museum collections. What may be the various methodologies employed by artists to (re)present the pieces brought back, and how are they perceived by the different types of audience?

Artistic interventions offer a platform free of discriminating and belittling criteria, participate in changing the ways through which artefacts have been viewed and understood. Thanks to artistic mediation, new dialogues can be established between the museum institution and the public.

Paper short abstract:

What might be the conceptual or virtual sense of voice as an index of what is missing (“omissions”) from the question of “object lessons” in ethnographic museums? My presentation will explore the curatorial interventions in the current exhibition of Benin artefacts at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin.

Paper long abstract:

Critical discourses on “object lessons” in museum ethnography can now be read across a spectrum from Augustus Pitt-Rivers to Donald Preziosi and Quatremère de Quincy to Françoise Vergès (to mention only these). The museum is not simply a site, then, of and for the exhibition of cultural loot and the reproduction (the “doing”) of colonial history; but, potentially, for the unlearning of such lessons, suggesting a site of and for an emergent decolonial practice of ethnographic and curatorial “undoing”. With reference to the current exhibition in the Africa Galleries at the Humboldt Forum, my presentation will review the curatorial interventions that problematise presenting the museum’s Benin artefacts. At one end of these galleries, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’ film, "Les Statues Meurent Aussi", originally commissioned by Présence Africaine, plays on a loop. At the other end, a gallery stages “omissions” in the name of which the complicity of photography with colonial ethnography is addressed. In between, there is a gallery of “talking heads”, with curators from Benin and Berlin evoking the manifold “presence” of these artefacts. In dialogue with poets (such as Okri and Osundare, Dunbar and Senghor), I will explore forms of prosopopoeia evoked by a desire “to give voice” (agency or even subjectivity) to objects that are otherwise “silenced” in the ethnographic museum. What might be the conceptual or virtual sense of voice here, as an index of what is missing (“omissions”) from the erstwhile question of “object lessons”?

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents arguments seeking to undo the official discourse around intangible cultural heritage. The paper contrasts this discourse with an experience of collaborative research and artistic intervention through the painting of murals in P’urhépecha indigenous communities.

Paper long abstract:

In 2003 the UNESCO adopted the Convention for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage. Since then, important criticisms have been made both towards the notion of intangible heritage as well as ongoing processes of heritagisation in many countries. The 2003 Convention, far from being an instrument for strengthening communities and social groups has instead fortified institutions of the nation state, as well as other powerful agents, principally from the tourist industry. This paper aims to undo the official discourse and offer alternatives to this global tendency. With this objective in mind, we will analyse the safeguarding strategies of the Convention, like the international lists and national inventories. We will also analyse different government interventions carried out by Mexican state institutions in the area of traditional music such as festivals, competitions, museums, archive records and audio libraries. The paper contrasts these institutional actions, national and international, with an experience of collaborative research and artistic intervention through the painting of murals in three P’urhépecha communities. The elaboration of these murals involved participation of P’urhépecha children who interviewed composers and then made drawing as part of a process focusing on the valuation of the lyrical-musical tradition of this indigenous people located in the state of Michoacan, western Mexico.

Paper short abstract:

Through my own performative artistic practice, which includes interventions into museums, I reflect on the different methods and tools artistic approaches provide to deal with the colonial heritage of museums and draw connections to current situations of inequality and discrimination.

Paper long abstract:

Artistic approaches have the capacity not only to unravel the colonial heritage of museums, but are also able to address it beyond institutional language and prevailing discourses. Artists can frame museums and the objects they possess not only as representatives of the past, but express how historic entanglements and oftentimes violent histories are perpetuated in various ways until today.

Performing with my alter ego “La Bolita Berlinesa” at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes Buenos Aires I filmed an intervention to an Argentinian painting called “The return of the Indian raid” by Ángel Della Valle (1892), depicting indigenous people as a wild mob, kidnapping white women and robbing churches. My gaze, garments and movements served as tools to address and combat racist and sexist visual stereotypes of indigenous people created with the help of paintings exhibited in museums and relate discriminations and racism indigenous people have faced in the past to the present.

With my second alter ego “Pocahunter” I am looking at the issue of human remains, which are kept in museums throughout Germany. Understanding them as symbols of the hidden and unseen significance a colonial past holds for Germany, as this is still a matter that is not included in Germany’s self- perception, I use the creation of performative videos to search for healing and connection to a past that cannot be put behind. Following these artistic examples we can understand their visual strategies as a way to open up gateways of interrogation for museum and their collections.