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.