Abstract
‘Looking back’, the new exhibition at Berlin’s Museum Treptow, is the first permanent exhibition to engage critically with Germany’s colonial past and post-colonial present. Co-curated by museum staff and Berlin-based activists, the exhibition centres around the anticolonial protest by 106 women, men and children recruited in formerly colonised African countries and brought to Berlin to perform traditional cultural practices at the ‘First German Colonial Exhibition’ in 1896. Building on low-key notions of resistance in contexts of violence (Därmann, ‘Widerstände’, 2021) and frameworks for alternative memory politics (Azoulay, ‘Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism’, 2019), I explore how the co-curators switch perspective, ‘look back’ and return the Western colonial gaze to uncover forms of agency, protest and resistance in (post-)colonial contexts by challenging Eurocentric binaries and over-simplistic perpetrator-victim divisions, without downplaying colonial power imbalances. By investigating how the co-curators situate the historical forms of resistance within the wider context of current anticolonial protest in Berlin and community-led biographical research about Black communities in Germany, I re-assess what could be the role of museums in identifying blind spots within institutionalised museum politics and engaging with local and activist communities. By assessing to what extent the exhibition is conceptualised as a public hub to foster debate, or a ‘safe space’ for Berlin’s Black communities and anticolonial activists, I question established visitor segmentation models and visitor/expert binaries, to explore what I call ‘activist citizenship’, i.e. a collaborative, empowering social practice to unlearn institutionalised historiographical approaches and transform alternative modes of knowledge production into the ‘potential now’.
Presenters
Annette LoesekeProfessor of Art History and Museum Studies, Institute of Art History, Braunschweig University of Art, Germany
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2023 Special Focus—Museum Transformations: Pathways to Community Engagement
KEYWORDS
Decolonising, Collaboration, Co-Curation, Activism, Activist-Communities, Unlearning, Activist-Citizenship
