Colonial contexts

Exhibition in Gießen "Zwischen Sammelwut & Forschungsdrang. Koloniale Kontexte in Gießen"

The spe­cial ex­hi­bi­tion Zwis­chen Sam­mel­wut & Forschungs­drang. Kolo­niale Kon­texte in Gießen (“Be­tween col­lec­tion ma­nia and the urge to re­search. Colo­nial Con­texts in Gießen”) at Ober­hes­sis­ches Mu­se­um Gießen pro­vides in­sight in­to the project Prove­nances of Ethno­graph­ic Ob­jects from Colo­nial Con­texts in Cen­tral Hesse fund­ed by the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion.

The mu­se­um is im­ple­ment­ing the project to­geth­er with the Ethno­graph­ic Col­lec­tion of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mar­burg from Novem­ber 2020 to Oc­to­ber 2022. On show un­til 15 Jan­uary 2023, the ex­hi­bi­tion pro­vides in­sight in­to the var­i­ous stages in­volved in prove­nance re­search and traces how the ethno­graph­ic ob­jects even­tu­al­ly found their way to Gießen. The mul­ti-faceted na­ture of col­lect­ing dur­ing the colo­nial era is ex­em­pli­fied by col­lec­tors such as Theodor Koch-Grün­berg and Rein­hard Houy.

Not all of the ori­gin sto­ries can be re­con­struct­ed: af­ter all, doc­u­ment­ed his­tor­i­cal sources re­lat­ing to the count­less ex­pe­di­tion helpers, porters, trans­la­tors and pro­duc­ers of the ob­jects are on­ly avail­able in ex­cep­tion­al cas­es.

In­sight in­to the col­lab­o­ra­tive re­search un­der­tak­en with two mu­se­ums in Tan­za­nia and Cameroon il­lus­trate the di­verse range of pos­si­bil­i­ties in ap­proach­ing the his­to­ry of the col­lec­tion and clos­ing gaps in re­search.

One par­tic­u­lar­ly in­ter­est­ing as­pect of the ex­hi­bi­tion is that it was cre­at­ed in col­lab­o­ra­tion with in­di­vid­u­als who have very dif­fer­ing as­so­ci­a­tions with the Ethno­graph­ic Col­lec­tion, in­clud­ing a large net­work of mu­se­um vis­i­tors and staff.
See here for de­tails