Decoding the Museum
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| 5 EUR, reduced 2.50 EUR |
| Book your ticket in advance online or at the pay desk in the foyer. |
| Live on site and as livestream |
| Event in English with simultaneous translation into German |
| Duration: 120 min |
| English, German |
| Accessible for wheelchairs |
| Ground Floor, Hall 2 |
| Part of: 99 Questions |
In the process of transforming museums and archives into more accessible spaces, digital tools have been widely embraced. Digitization appeals with the idea of open access and a (supposedly) free and democratic way to receive and share information about collections, objects, and their histories.
Thereby it gives transparency to data that has historically been reserved for so-called experts only, shifting the museum outwards into an open digital space where people can actively participate.
Frequently neglected, have however been the dangers and problems of digitization. The digital realm is not a neutral space but has explicit biases and racialized and gendered structures curated into its data and algorithms. More so, the taxonomic practices of museums have been encoded into digital databases from the archives, reproducing the colonial ways of ordering and cataloging the world that they inhabit.
Abstract
Colonial JPEGs and haunted code: Historical redress in the open digital commons
In 2022, thousands of images documenting looted Benin treasures, will be shared on a special digital research platform, led by the Museum am Rothenbaum (MARKK) in Hamburg. This marks an unprecedented opportunity to collate disparate artefacts in one place for an overview of colonial evidence, and thus greater accountability on repatriation journeys. This initiative is in line with a broader European cultural policy of open accessing, using technology to democratize collections and the knowledge they house. However, this digitisation effort has its blind spots and ethical challenges. Drawing on research in the context of Nordic photographic collections, this talk engages the following questions: What does it mean for African cultural resources to dematerialize and become data? In what ways does the digital catalogue reproduce colonial structures and epistemologies? And, how might metadata and other media be used as a means of historical redress.
The Open Restitution Africa project is an Africa-led initiative seeking to open up access to information on restitution of African material culture and human ancestors, to empower all stakeholders involved to make knowledge-based decisions.
Digital Benin is an online platform project which compiles data from the diverse international museum databases that currently hold Benin objects in their collections. The project will bring together photographs, oral histories, and rich documentation material from collections worldwide to provide a long-requested overview of the royal artworks looted in the 19th century. The colonial occupation of the Kingdom of Benin (now Edo State, Nigeria) by British troops in February 1897 led to a worldwide dispersal of an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 objects collectively called the “Benin bronzes”, which were plundered from the Royal Palace and other ceremonial sites. It is the aim of this project to digitally assemble this royal collection and to connect it to objects produced by Benin’s guilds and circulated before 1897 as well as to productions of the early colonial period. With the support of the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung, the Museum am Rothenbaum (MARKK) in Hamburg has opened an international project office to digitally network the globally dispersed works of art from the former Kingdom of Benin.
Podium (connected via video)
is an art historian and Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Malmö University. She is author of the award-winning book: Africans in English Caricature 1769-1819: Black Jokes White Humour (2017). Her research and curatorial practices are concerned with race and visual coding in popular culture, colonial archives/archiving, slavery and visuality, postmemorial art and performance, and ethics of care-in-representation. Overall, she is focused on the ways art can mediate social transformation and healing.
is an experienced digital heritage specialist and digital humanities scholar. She is the founder of African Digital Heritage, a non-profit organisation that seeks to encourage a more critical and holistic approach to the design and implementation of digital solutions within African cultural heritage. She is also a co-founder of the Museum of British Colonialism where she leads digital engagement and a co-founder of the Open Restitution Africa initiative.
has extensive experience in the non-profit environment within the cultural field in South Africa. She works across the African continent and the global south on arts for social change programmes. Molemo is a co-founder of the Open Restitution Africa initiative, head of research at Andani Africa, a lecturer in History of Art at Wits University, and one half of the artist collaborative MADEYOULOOK.
is a specialist for digital heritage and a digital humanities scholar. Her work applies technology, design and humanities research for the interaction, exploration and opening of cultural heritage preserved and represented in digital data. She is the founder of The Institute for Digital Heritage and principal investigator for Digital Benin, leading the development of a digital platform which brings together rich documentation from collections worldwide to provide a long-requested overview of the royal artworks looted in the 19th century from the Kingdom of Benin.
is Research Lead (Principal Researcher) of the Digital Benin project in Benin City. He is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Benin Studies, presently the Secretary to the Executive Council of the Institute, and a Fellow of the French Institute for Research in Africa, Nigeria (IFRA-NIGERIA) as well as a member of Lagos Studies Association (LSA). His research interests are Ethnicity and Nationalism, Migration and Citizenship, Cultural History in general and Benin Studies in particular. Ekhator-Obogie graduated from Adeyemi College of Education, Ondo with a Bachelor’s Degree in Arts and Education (History).
