Curating Transcultural Spaces: Perspectives on Postcolonial Conflicts in Museum Culture: Visual Cultures and German Contexts Sarah Hegenbart Bloomsbury Visual Arts

Curating Transcultural Spaces

Perspectives on Postcolonial Conflicts in Museum Culture

Curating Transcultural Spaces

Perspectives on Postcolonial Conflicts in Museum Culture

Description

Curating Transcultural Spaces asks what a museum which enables the presentation of multiple perspectives might look like. Can identity be global and local at the same time? How may one curate dual identity? More broadly, what is the link between the arts and processes of identity construction?

This volume, an indispensable source for the process of engaging with colonial history in Germany and beyond, takes its starting point from the 'scandal' of the Humboldt Forum. The transfer of German state collections from the Ethnological Museum and the Museum for Asian Art, located at the margins of Berlin in Dahlem, into the centre of Germany's capital indicates the nation's aspiration of purported multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism; yet the project's resurrection of the site's former Prussian city palace, which was demolished during the GDR, stands in opposition to its very mission, given that the Prussian rulers benefited from colonial exploitation. By examining the contrasting successes of other projects, such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, Curating Transcultural Spaces compellingly argues for the necessity of taking post-colonial thinking on board in the construction of museum spaces in order to generate genuine exchange between multiple perspectives.

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Preface: Positionality Statement

1. Introduction: Collaborating cultures, negotiating identities, Sarah Hegenbart (Technical University Munich, Germany)

Part One: Curating Transcultural Spaces

2. Initial Legal and Policy Questions Surrounding Objects Dispossessed in Colonial Context, Kwame Opoku (previously, United Nations Office in Vienna, Austria)
3. Symptoms of postcolonial aporia and (national) identity crises in Germany (Sarah Hegenbart Technical University Munich, Germany)
4. Multiple Modernisms – curating the postwar era for the present, Kristian Handberg (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

Part Two: Confronting the colonial past and constructing identities on the African continent

5. The Architecture and Aesthetics of Apartheid: Dada in South Africa, a Case Study, Thomas Haakenson (California College of the Arts in San Francisco, California, USA)
6. Contested Memories and Spaces: Art, Archives, and Ambivalence in 'Ovizire · Somgu: From Where Do We Speak', a case study from Namibia, Julia Rensing (University of Basel, Switzerland)
7. Democracy reflected in Form Space and Order: Learning from West Africa's Ancient Empires, a Case Study from Nigeria, Olajumoke Adenowo (Architect, AD Consulting, Nigeria)
8. Westerns made in Africa, a Case Study from Burkina Faso, Camille Varenne (Filmmaker, Independent, France)

Part Three: Post-Colonial Conflicts, colonial memories and negotiating identities in Germany

9. Troubling the Nation: Black Germans and the Teaching of History, Jeff Bowersox (University College London, UK)
10. The African Diaspora Palace: The Pastfuture of Black Knowledge in Europe, Natasha A. Kelly (Filmmaker, Artist, Author, Berlin, Germany)
11. Cosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories in Berlin: The Humboldt Forum and the current Shift in Germany's Culture of Remembrance, Thomas Thiemeyer (The University of Tübingen, Germany)
12. Under the shadow of the Christian cross: visions, delusions, and national Realpolitik. Whose concepts will be seen, whose voices can be heard behind the coat of baroque facades inside a faked Prussian palace?, Viola Konig (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)

Conclusion

Index

Product details

Published	Aug 21 2025
Format	Paperback
Edition	1st
Extent	278
ISBN	9781350227767
Imprint	Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Illustrations	78 bw illus
Dimensions	9 x 6 inches
Series	Visual Cultures and German Contexts
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

This compelling volume invites different perspectives and analysis to coexist about Germany's most controversial cultural projects of the last three decades, the Humboldt Forum. By framing such museum spaces as “transcultural”, Sarah Hegenbarth highlights the significance of focusing on relationally, rather than essence in contemporary curatorial practice, opening up spaces for dialogue, conflict and debate.

Margareta von Oswald, Associate researcher, Center for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. Author of Working Through Colonial Collections. An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin (2022).
Channelling multiple perspectives on the ways artistic, curatorial and architectural practices can address entangled colonial histories, this book explores novel forms of identity construction in museum spaces and their formative role in contemporary multicultural societies.

Eva Huttenlauch, Head of Collections Postwar & Contemporary Art, Lenbachhaus Munich, Germany
With 12 case studies from Germany all the way to South Africa, Namibia, Nigeria and Burkina Faso, this unique collection of critical and creative approaches to decolonizing and reshaping museum collections provides
a timely intervention into the curating of colonial-era artefacts.

Michael Falser, Heisenberg Fellow of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and Associate Professor of Global Art and Architectural History at Technical University Munich, Germany
This timely book provides a sensitive and multi-layered look into Germany's current discourses around identity, heritage and museums. Boldly critical of the way colonial histories have been addressed, it highlights a plethora of artistic, architectural, museological and political histories which underpin present-day approaches to curating.

Eva Bentcheva, Associate Lecturer, Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University , Germany