A model wears a gold helmet from Colombias ethnological museum
© Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek / Photo: Yva, Public Domain Mark 1.0
Gold helmet featuring the image of a woman
© Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum, Dietrich Graf, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
image 1:
A model wears a gold helmet from Colombias ethnological museum
© Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek / Photo: Yva, Public Domain Mark 1.0
image 2:
Gold helmet featuring the image of a woman
© Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum, Dietrich Graf, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Past events
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On 12 February 1933, two weeks after the National Socialists came to power, a photo series appeared in the Berliner Illustrierte featuring white models wearing jewellery from ethnological collections. The famous Berlin photographer Yva (Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon) staged the style of the ‘Neue Frau’ from the Weimar Republic alongside objects from colonial contexts, thereby creating something new. Art historian Marta Oliveira Sonius and historian Tom Werner present the objects alongside the avant-garde photographer’s historical photographs, discuss contemporary perspectives on the works, and situate them within the intertwined history of colonialism and the Holocaust in the ethnological collections.

Participants

Marta Oliveira Sonius holds a Master’s Degree in History of Art and in Social and Cultural Anthropology of the Ancient Americas from the Freie Universität Berlin. Currently, she works as a freelance museum educator at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin and as a research assistant at the Catholic University Nordrhein-Westfalen.

Marta de Oliveira Sonius
© Paul de Oliveira Sonius

Tom Werner is a historian who has been active in the field of political and historical education for many years. For about 10 years, he has been working intensively on various projects related to colonialism and how we deal with it. He occasionally translates texts from English and Italian.

Tom Werner
© Private

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