Paper short abstract:

This contribution focuses on the remediation of musealized objects by contemporary artists. Their artistic research practices deal with colonial continuities in ethnographic museums. Thinking with their projects, I argue that such research practices lead to concepts of museums as polyvocal spaces.

Paper long abstract:

The 19th century saw the birth of ethnographic museums in Europe - impressive buildings in which exhibitions and research forged a crucial link between colonized, "othered" cultures and white superiority. Decolonizing such institutions is a pressing matter. I divided my presentation into three parts. I'll begin with a more general introduction of artistic research within my Ph.D project "Disrupting Colonial Displays: Translating and framing collected objects as practices of artists and curators toward a reconfiguration of ethnographic museums," which focuses on colonial display formats and postcolonial remediations of objects. For exploring notions of artistic research in museums, I will then provide you with an example The Other Nefertiti by Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles (2015). Finally, I will highlight aspects of the performance series Ondaanisa yo Pomudhime - Dance of the Rubber Tree (2018 - ongoing) by Namibian scholar and artist Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja. Both artworks highlight problematic aspects in contemporary museums' practices, like claiming property and regulating access to objects. They criticize current approaches to cultural heritage preservation in its broader sociopolitical contexts; hence they propose a usage of such objects that takes their ephemeral qualities into consideration, like fire and decay. Artistic research offers new perspectives for museums to navigate complex power relations within their collection.