Paper short abstract:

This papers discusses the use of sound, particularly voices, for the critical engagement with colonial history in ethnographic museums with a special focus on the traveling exhibition "What We See. Images, Voices and Versioning".

Paper long abstract:

The traveling exhibition "What We See. Images, Voices and Versioning", initally curated by Annette Hoffmann for the IZIKO Slave Lodge in Cape Town, 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.

The Namibians' accounts of colonial rule as well as their "Greetings to Germany" are complemented by archival material, video interviews with some of their descendants as well as portrait paintings by contemporary South African artists inspired by their "unruly voices".

The exhibition's dialogical and multisensory approach breaks with the "authoritarian and ocular-centric forms of didacticism that characterize the earlier organization of the exhibitionary complex" (Bennett 2006) and invests the visitor with a clear responsibility of "making sense" of the various sources and stimuli.

Considering the power-laden dynamics between artefact, curators, collecting and exhibiting institutions, and audiences, this paper discusses the multisensory aesthetic and discursive strategies that the exhibition adopted in order to display disquiet of the discipline's anthropometric past.

How and why did the significance of the "ghostly" voices change according to the different exhibiting contexts (Cape Town, Basel, Vienna, Berlin)?