Presentations

17/07/19
Locating the Museum – Colonial Collections and their Publics
Museum Collections in Motion Final Panel Discussion

17/07/19
The Polity and the Ethnographic Museum: Where’s the Rub?

16/07/19
Restitution of African Artifacts: The Next Step, a New Relational Ethic
Museum Collections in Motion Evening Keynote by Felwine Sarr (Saint-Louis)

14/07/19
“Bringing home our Gods”
Nationalistic and Populistic Dangers in Debates about Heritage Restitution in India
“I belong to my People” Support @IndiaPrideProj Recent years have witnessed overall debates about the legitimacy and the future of the museum, especially of the ethnographic museum. An important reason for this is the question of provenance. How did the objects we encounter when visiting a museum get there and what does that mean? These […]

14/07/19
Palace Museums in the Cameroon Grassfields
Sites of Inclusion, Exclusion, and Alienation
In an average year, the museums in the Cameroon Grassfields host a wide range of visitors including international tourists and expats, members of the diaspora who return home to visit, students, academic researchers, and Cameroonians interested in art and culture. The Grassfields museums consciously set out to serve the needs and expectations of these local […]

14/07/19
Challenges of rewriting the Khomani San/Bushman archive at Iziko Museums of South Africa
After many years of discussion and deliberation the controversial Ethnographic Gallery at Iziko South African Museum was finally de-installed on 15 September 2017. The response to the decision elicited an interesting and conflicting range of responses.  Several members of the public, including Khoisan descendants, complained about the closure, while a number of Khoisan chiefs and Khoisan […]

14/07/19
A Contamination of Provenance?
The Relevance of Extended Materialities to Provenance Research and Restitution Processes. Examples from the Linden Museum Stuttgart
    Figure 1: the whip and bible ascribed to Hendrik Witbooi once prepared for transport to Namibia (February 2019, Linden Museum, photograph: Dominik Drasdow). In 2013, the Ministry of Sciences, Research and Art of Baden-Württemberg, in cooperation with the Linden Museum, initiated the process with Namibian counterparts that would lead to the restitution of […]

10/07/19
A postcolonial moment in analytic engagement with museum ethnographic collections?
• A postcolonial moment emerges as happenings of political, cultural and epistemic work in institutional and organisational settings—it is passage, trajectory, going-on inflected in particular ways. • Postcolonialism is not a stoppage or reversal of colonialism, rather a re-gathering and diverting. It is using resources at hand, albeit in some way an outcome of the […]