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 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”?