Exhibition reviews

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Carl Deußen
01/08/22
„Our Colonial Heritage”
An Exhibition Review of the Tropenmuseum´s New Permanent Exhibition
Entering the Tropenmuseum always fills me with a mixed feeling of awe and discomfort. The grandiose imperial architecture of its central hall has lost nothing of its power to instil these emotions in the visitor coming face to face with what was once the Koloniaal Museum of the Dutch Empire. Since then, the museum’s contents […]
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Malina LauterbachYann LeGall
08/12/21
An exhibition for the future, but what future for the exhibition?
Hey Hamburg, kennst du Rudolf Duala Manga Bell? at the MARKK
If you don’t live in Hamburg and already know the story of Rudolf Duala Manga Bell, you will naturally ask yourself whether a visit to the latest exhibition of the MARKK, entitled Hey Hamburg, do you know Rudolf Duala Manga Bell? would be worthwhile. The exhibition is part of the special programs MARKK in Motion […]
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Irene HildenHarriet MerrowAndrei Zavadski
03/03/21
Present Imperfect, Future Intense:
The Digital Opening of the Humboldt Forum
On December 16, 2020, the Humboldt Forum—a major cultural centre in the middle of Berlin—officially opened. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the opening took place online and consisted of two events: a press conference and an opening ceremony. Ambitious and expensive, the Humboldt Forum has been fraught with controversy ever since it was conceived. And […]
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Leander Pöhls
08/07/20
VOM LESEN IM MUSEUM
HIER UND JETZT im Museum Ludwig. Dynamische Räume 6. Juni - 30. August 2020
This review is currently only available in German.
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Bert Hoffmann
28/04/20
Re-Colonizing Memory
Guadeloupe’s Slavery Museum and the Struggle over Identity in the French Caribbean
This building is a statement. When you enter the port of Pointe-à-Pitre, the capital of the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe, you do not see an imposing cathedral, a government palace or a stadium. What catches your eye is a museum. A modern structure, covered with a metallic grid evoking tropical trees’ aerial roots, stretching for […]
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Jan HeidtmannClara RöhrigJana Schäfer
29/01/19
Curating Relationships Collaboratively – From Intertwined Objects to Intertwined Subjects
Sorry, this contribution is currently only available in German. It will be translated into English soon.
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Anna Seiderer
06/11/18
Empirical notes on the exhibition “L’Un et l’Autre” (One and the Other)
Palais de Tokyo, Paris 2018
“It is so much easier if you are an art museum!”[1] In the framework of the conference Exchanging perspectives: anthropologies, museum collections and colonial legacies between Paris and Berlin[2], I was asked to give an overview on the institutional changes of Parisian art museums with regard to colonial history. Indeed, I could have mentioned several […]
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Anujah Fernando
16/01/18
„lookingBACK“ and the question of gaze
A Review of the Permanent Exhibition at the Berlin Museum Treptow
In October 2017, in the midst of the scuffle over Humboldt’s legacy, a permanent exhibition with the cautious title „zurückGESCHAUT” (lookingBACK) opened in Berlin’s outer district of Treptow. With this exhibition, the Museum of Local History critically engages with the First German Colonial Exhibition, which took place in 1896 on the grounds of the Treptower […]
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Johanna Di Blasi
12/12/17
A Look into the Vienna Weltmuseum
The relaunched Ethnological Museum of Vienna gives us a first taste of Berlin’s Humboldt Forum to come
Following a three-year renovation period, the former Ethnological Museum in Hofburg/Vienna was recently reopened as the Vienna Weltmuseum (VWM). Responsible for content development and the presentation of the exhibits was the same museum exhibition design firm, Ralph Appelbaum Associates, which previously designed the Canadian National Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg and the National Museum […]
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Cordula Weißköppel
31/10/17
Blind Spots and Asterisks in the Subtitle
Reactions to the Exhibition “Bremen and Art in the Colonial Era”
In individual psychology, blind spots are the phenomenon in which certain emotionally unpleasant matters are blocked out of subjective consciousness, rendering them inaccessible to conscious processing. They have seldom been diagnosed in museums; after all, these institutions exhibit what is beautiful and important in a society and shed a special light on what was previously […]
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