In two of Berlin’s National Museums, the Museum für Asiatische Kunst (Asian Art Museum) and the Ethnologisches Museum (Ethnological Museum), contemporary art has never featured as prominently as it does today. The Humboldt Lab Dahlem has been one of the main drivers behind this current state of affairs. In its trial runs involving innovative exhibition strategies for the future Humboldt-Forum, the Humboldt Lab has assigned a significant role to contemporary art.

The symposium “Historical Collections and Contemporary Art: a Discussion on Curatorial Strategies”, held on July 2 and 3, 2015, in the Dahlem Museums, brought together an interdisciplinary group of ethnologists and art historians working in museums and universities. Their common objective: to partake in a critical debate about how and why contemporary art can be integrated in historical collections. The event served to highlight the broad spectrum of contemporary art perspectives held by the actors who participate in this discourse, views which can be attributed to different disciplinary, discursive, historical and institutional backgrounds. One important result of the conference was the insight that as a category, “contemporary” requires a more nuanced reading. This conceptual fine-tuning could help identify curatorial possibilities for a worthwhile integration of historical collections and contemporary art in exhibition spaces.

Reflections from the philosopher Peter Osborne may prove enlightening in this context. Osborne has noted that “contemporary” cannot lay claim to being a universal category, since it lacks a uniform chronological structure and it is constructed by various historical, geopolitical, discursive and institutional conditions. One central aspect that emerged during the symposium was the importance of questioning why different institutions show contemporary art in exhibitions organized by specific notions of (historical) time and space. Participants also argued that these notions must be dislodged to enable a critical approach to conventional institutional structures.

In her work, Paola Ivanov, who curated the symposium together with Verena Rodatus, makes a point of critically engaging with why ethnological museums have resisted and rejected contemporaneity since their establishment during the colonial era. Constituted by evolutionary discourses typical for the modern Western world, the ethnological museum was the institution that housed art and everyday artefacts from Africa and stood for an ahistorical, static tradition and – based on the prevailing paradigm of progress – the earlier stages of evolutionary development. By relating objects from different regional contexts but similar contemporary periods, Ivanov not only wants to question the assumed temporal disparity between Europe and Africa, but also generate awareness for simultaneous contemporaneities.

Until recently, ethnological museums saw themselves as institutions of cultural representation, entities that conveyed purportedly authentic knowledge about other cultures – in line with Western epistemological categories. Contemporary art and curatorial strategies can be wielded to interrogate this institutional self-image and its accompanying classification systems and power structures. Ivanov emphasizes the need for a critical encounter with the aesthetics of “other” societies in this context. Kerstin Pinther felt that a focus on culturally specific aesthetics may veer off course towards essentialism or, in other words, a homogenizing and closed perspective of culture. She argued instead for an anthropological view of art and its societal consequences. Jaqueline Berndt, too, seemed to advocate a stronger emphasis on how artefacts function in society by suggesting that they be understood as media. Alexander Hofmann shared Pinther’s misgivings while also remarking that an engagement with aesthetic issues must be situated within a larger framework that examines different concepts and understandings of art.

Viola König, director of the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, urged fellow attendees to recall the longstanding tradition of showing contemporary art and collaborating with contemporary artists in Dahlem. Long before receiving international acclaim, contemporary Indonesian artist Henri Dono researched in the museum’s archives. König welcomed the more systematic approach to contemporary art and curatorial strategies as part of the collaboration with the Humboldt Lab. Martin Heller, part of the director team at the Humboldt Lab, and curator Angela Rosenberg were also convinced that interventions stemming from contemporary art have often challenged previous classifications and added a vibrant note to permanent exhibitions.

Klaas Ruitenbeek, director of the Museum für Asiatische Kunst in Berlin, underscored that he gives priority to historical collections. Yet in his mind’s eye, the museum under his purview is a place that exhibits Asian art through the ages. Ruitenbeek views isolated appearances, or interventions, of contemporary art in historical collections with skepticism. This can be interpreted as a critique of the universalistic claim laid by “art interventions”, a concept primarily defined by the European avant-garde. In exhibiting contemporary art in the museum, Ruitenbeek mainly wants to “tell stories”. Contemporary art, he believes, should be used to show how contemporary artists engage with artistic traditions and in doing so, continue to write art history. The director emphasizes that the Museum für Asiatische Kunst, unlike all other art museums in Berlin, has no chronological restrictions; it shows art from all eras. With this message, he implicitly refers to the temporal and spatial dualism that so firmly defines the art museum landscape in Berlin. Rooted in Western modernity, it is a system that obeys the logic of “traditional versus modern” and “domestic versus foreign”. Whereas the Nationalgalerie (National Gallery) is charged with representing and propagating the European and American art history narrative, the Museum für Asiatische Kunst distinguishes itself from this institution of “domestic” art by showing the art of “others”. Ruitenbeek has expressed interest in increasing collaborative efforts with the Nationalgalerie and the Hamburger Bahnhof in the future. This proposal may well signify a constructive examination of these institutional definitions and perhaps even create new temporal and spatial horizons for both contemporary and historical art.

Kerstin Pinther emphasized the importance of considering different local and interwoven stories of contemporaneity in order to extricate the temporal and spatial structures that are written into art and ethnological museums. Upending dominant systems, narratives and canons is something that is often easier said than done, noted Britta Schmitz, even after major narratives have run their course. Regardless of their success, from her European perspective Schmitz attributed these types of upheaval to the year 1989. Schmitz advocated a conceptual shift through a new focus on interwoven narratives. Kerstin Pinther and Tobias Wendl emphasized the need for collections to actually reflect this new focus, since collecting the “other Moderns” is also an important instrument for reconceptualizing the temporal and spatial structures embodied in museums. The time-honored chronology handed down by the institution of European-American art history, for example, clearly situates contemporary art after modern art. Nonetheless, this is not always the case: the Tate Modern, Lena Fritsch reported, has consciously broken with this timeline and instead relates narratives based on transhistorical topics und multiple histories. Artistic networks and their role have received praise as an overarching exhibition topic, for example. Other exhibitions that reveal formal and aesthetic links have been criticized for catering to “global art” as an art market genre that seldom comes under critical scrutiny.

Precisely those structures that generate meaning and value must be critically reflected, emphasized Ursula Helg. Instead of formal aesthetic ties, critical engagement with different concepts and their development would present a promising approach. An examination of the history of exhibitions and research according to formal aesthetic criteria could prove interesting, as suggested during the symposium by art historian Julia Orell for East Asian art and art history and by Pinther for same topics in an African context.

Though critical interventions targeting institutions were greeted as an important curatorial tool to “disrupt European narratives”, as Elena Zanichelli put it, they did not escape scrutiny. Anke Bangma noted that due to their dualistic structure, these interventions would not be able to discard the trappings of institutional logic. Instead of finding new pathways, they often serve to validate existing structures. Artist Lisl Ponger’s statement that she rejects interventions in museums because they do not give her the necessary equipment to approach dominant institutional discourses and therefore run the risk of undercutting her individual artistic autonomy should be understood in this context.

The symposium made it clear that the museums must radically reinvent themselves in order to live up to the complexity of interwoven histories, multiple moderns and disjunctive contemporaneities. According to Jonathan Fine, beyond self-reflexive criticism of institutions and their modes of operation, the challenge is not only to talk about “us” but to let objects speak from multiple perspectives. Hofmann, too, emphasized the need to examine the different “careers” of objects in terms of their production and their reception and voiced the hope that art and ethnological museums will use this opportunity as a starting point for fruitful collaboration. Bangma confirmed that she will apply these concepts to tie together objects and multiple subjectivities and stories. In this sense, ethnological museums and art museums – and the related disciplines of ethnology and art history – are called on as institutions to rethink and update their horizons in terms of space and time.

Translated from German by Sarah Matthews

Dr. Birgit Hopfener works as a research assistant at the Art History Department, Freie Universität Berlin.

Link Program Symposium "Historical Collections and Contemporary Art" (PDF)

The symposium “Historical Collections and Contemporary art: a Discussion of Curatorial Strategies” was held on July 2 and 3, 2015 at the Dahlem Museums.

Participants:
Anke Bangma (Curator for Contemporary Art, National Museum of World Cultures, Amsterdam)
Jaqueline Berndt (Graduate School of Manga, Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto)
Lena Fritsch (Assistant Curator, Collections International Art, Tate Modern, London)
Ursula Helg (Art historian and ethnologist, Freie Universität, Berlin)
Viola König (Director of the Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin)
Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi (Artist and Curator, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire)
Julia Orell (Postdoc-Fellow, Academia Sinica, Taipei)
Kerstin Pinther (Art historian and ethnologist, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich)
Lisl Ponger (Artist, Vienna)
Angela Rosenberg (Curator, Berlin)
Klaas Ruitenbeek (Director of the Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin)
Britta Schmitz (Chief Curator, Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin)
Agnes Wegner (Managing director of the Humboldt Lab Dahlem, Berlin)
Elena Zanichelli (Art historian and Curator, Leuphana University, Lüneburg)
Moderation:
Jonathan Fine (Curator of the Africa Collection, Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin)
Alexander Hofmann (Curator for Japanese Art, Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin)
Paola Ivanov (Curator of the Africa Collection, Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin)
Verena Rodatus (Research assistant, Humboldt Lab Dahlem, Berlin)
Moderation of the final discussion:
Tobias Wendl (Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Freie Universität, Berlin)

Concept of the symposium: Jonathan Fine, Silvia Gaetti, Alexander Hofmann, Paola Ivanov, Margareta von Oswald, Verena Rodatus