Museums, Transculturality, and the Nation-State: Case Studies from a Global Context 9783839455142

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Susanne Leeb, Nina Samuel (eds.) Museums, Transculturality, and the Nation-State

Museum | Volume 52

Susanne Leeb works as a professor of contemporary art at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg. She is the cofounder (together with Beate Söntgen) of the program PriMus – Promovieren im Museum (PhD in Museums research program). Additionally, she is the cofounder of the book series “Polypen” at b_books, Berlin. Her research focusses on post-, anti-, and decolonial art histories, with a focus on contemporary art. Nina Samuel works as a postdoctoral researcher at the “Matters of Activity: Image Space Material” Cluster of Excellence at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. An art historian and curator, she has been the program director of PriMus – Promovieren im Museum. Her doctorate was sponsored by a scholarship from eikones – Center for the Theory and History of Images at the University of Basel, and she has held various research positions, including at the Bard Graduate Center in New York. Her research interests are image theory and the history of science, knowledge practices, contemporary curatorial strategies, and a material epistemology of the museum.

Susanne Leeb, Nina Samuel (eds.)

Museums, Transculturality, and the Nation-State Case Studies from a Global Context

This book was realized with the support of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the funding program VIP+. It is published in the framework of PriMus – Promovieren im Museum (PhD in Museums research program) at Leuphana University Lüneburg and emerges from the international conference “Narrating Culture(s) in Museums and Exhibitions” (Lüneburg, 18-19 January 2018).

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http:// dnb.d-nb.de © 2022 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Inspired by Yinka Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle (2010) Translation from French: Zoe Stillpass Copyediting: Erin Troseth Proofreading: Erin Troseth, Sergueï Spetschinsky Assistance: Ruth Stamm, Nele Wulff Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5514-8 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5514-2 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839455142 ISSN of series: 2702-3990 eISSN of series: 2702-9026 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

Contents

Museums, Transculturality, and the Nation-State Some Remarks on Their Entanglement Susanne Leeb ....................................................................... 7

Introduction: Museum Narratives between Transculturality and the Nation-State From the Origins of this Book to a Short Survey of Its Contents Nina Samuel ........................................................................ 17

‘Come On Home’ Insistent Presences and Diasporic Selves Natasha Ginwala ................................................................... 27

Museums in Contemporary Educational and Cultural Systems [1971] Stanislas Spero Adotevi ............................................................ 39

Remembering and Forgetting in the National Museums of South Asia Kavita Singh ....................................................................... 53

Repatriating Cultural Identity The Egyptian Discontinuity Pretext Monica Hanna ...................................................................... 87

Die Völker der Erde (People of the Earth) With an Introduction by Ruth Stamm Rajkamal Kahlon .................................................................. 103

On the In-Betweenness of the Paintings of Jean Baptiste Vanmour (1671–1737) at the Rijksmuseum Mirjam Shatanawi ................................................................. 123

Shameful Objects, Apologizing Subjects The False Memory Syndrome and Ultranationalism in the Politics of Representation in Macedonia Suzana Milevska .................................................................. 159

Towards a Cosmopolitical Exhibition Practice An Analysis of Place-Based Exhibitions Seeking to Engage with Cross-Cultural Encounters in Australian Museums Andrea Witcomb .................................................................. 187

Visiting the Colección Poyón, or Indigeneity and the Nation-State in Guatemala Performing the Nation for Two Hundred Years Sebastián Eduardo Dávila ......................................................... 213

Contributors ................................................................... 241

Museums, Transculturality, and the Nation-State Some Remarks on Their Entanglement Susanne Leeb

The starting point for thinking about the intertwining of ‘museum’, ‘transculturality’, and ‘nation-state’ is owed to one of the most obvious contemporary contradictions in (post)migrant societies with regard to museums: museums in the Global North represent a glorious past and the so-called heritage of mankind, yet huge parts of this mankind are excluded via economic inequalities as well as restrictions of mobility and accessibility, and are thus cut off from this very same history. The same applies to the value creation that has taken place as cultural practices and their artefacts have been transformed into museum treasures.1 Since the nation-state and capital are not separable in their current formation, the nation-state is still an agent of appropriative and accumulative economies, in short, ‘economies of enrichment’, as Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre write in their article ‘The Economic Life of Things’ and elaborate on in their book Enrichment.2 This holds true especially for the ‘collection form’ and ‘its orientation towards the past’: as Boltanski and

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For a more detailed argument, see Susanne Leeb, ‘Local Time, Or the Presence of an Ancient Past’, Texte zur Kunst 105 (March 2017), 99–118 (in German and in English). For the violent transformation into museum treasure, see the case of a ship investigated by Götz Aly in his book Das Prachtboot. Wie Deutsche die Kunstschätze der Südsee raubten (Munich: Beck, 2021), in which he narrates the ultraviolent context in which the ship was ‘acquired’, i.e. stolen, by Germans in the Pacific region, in today’s Papua Neu Guinea. The ‘magnificent ship’ was supposed to be exhibited in the entry hall of the recently opened Humboldt Forum in Berlin as one of the museum’s most prominent ‘treasures’. Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, ‘The Economic Life of Things: Commodities, Collectibles, Assets’, New Left Review 98 (March/April 2016), 31–56; Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity, 2020).

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Esquerre state, ‘While the standard form assessed the value of new objects, intended for use, the collection form establishes the worth of older things, independently of their possible uses’3 —and, as one could add, commodifies the past as art. Whereas at the beginning of the museum era, ethnographic and archaeological collections in particular supported and served imperialism and colonialism, and were constitutive for the invention of the nation-state,4 it seems that the nation-state is no longer a useful category for framing and situating art and culture. On the contrary, international forms of cooperation and the fact of globality have overtaken it—unless it explicitly reappears in the nationalist demands of authoritarian populisms. Whereas art history has necessarily discarded the national framework in recent decades and research in the discipline has shifted to transculturality, contact zones, transmodernisms, and discrepant cosmopolitanisms, the contradictions mentioned above remain too obvious to let the question of the nation-state and its agendas rest. To this day and in the field of museums, the nation-state plays a decisive role less for the national imagination than for the institutions’ material structures in terms of their foundation, financing, and ownership (an observation which holds true at least for Europe, not necessarily for the US, and in times of rising private funding). At least in the so-called West, it is rather rare that museums today explicitly tell the success story of a nation and base a national identity on it. Instead, they emphasize their cosmopolitan qualities or euphemistically claim a ‘common’ heritage or a transnational, transcultural or polyperspectival approach. But this claim is part of the above-mentioned contradictions between the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism, with which museums like to decorate themselves and which they legitimize through their international collections, and a transculturality that would also entail material conditions, i.e. accessibility and property relations. There are at least two current occasions to (re)pose the question of the nation-state. In their 2001 States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the 3 4

Boltanski and Esquerre, ‘Economic Life of Things’, 40. This has famously been elaborated by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), as well as by Tony Bennett in The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995) and Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995). Sharon Macdonald has taken up this thread by extending the question of the nation-state towards the question of transcultural identities. See Sharon Macdonald, ‘Museums, National, Postnational and Transcultural Identities’, Museum and Society 1, no. 1 (2003): 1–16.

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Postcolonial State, Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat start from what today is a still-contemporary situation when they write that the current rethinking of the state occurs at a juncture where the very notion of the state as a regulator of social life and a locus of territorial sovereignty and cultural legitimacy is facing unprecedented challenges. Ethnic mobilization, separatist movements, globalization of capital and trade, and intensified movement of people as migrants and refugees all tend to undermine the sovereignty of state power, especially in the postcolonial world.5 If contemporary migration complements historical (post)colonial relations, the other occasion that does so is the debate around restitution and the issues in the wake of restitution: accessibility and ownership. Therefore, we transfer the diagnosis of Hansen and Stepputat to the context of museums and cultural heritage. Many artefacts and works of art that are today under the umbrella of the nation-state or its federal system in terms of representation and property date from times before territories throughout the world were shaped as colonies, when culture and museums became important instruments for national agendas. This is true not only for the socalled West and former colonial powers but also for newly established nation-states after independence, as Elizabeth Harney has set out in the case of Nigeria, for instance.6 The conflicts that arise in this process were already described some time ago by Partha Chatterjee in his 1986 book Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, where they are described as an unresolved tension between the ‘people’s nation’ and the ‘state nation’, whereby the latter has absorbed ‘the political life of the nation into the body of the state …, while striving to keep the contradictions between capital and the people in perpetual suspension’.7 This unresolved tension appears in many places, and museums often play a very dominant role in it. Daniel Herwitz, for example, shows in his text ‘Heritage and Legacy in the South African State

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Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, ‘Introduction: States of Imagination’ in States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 1. Elizabeth Harney, In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 168.

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and University’8 how the country’s national museums serve as agents of the South African state, performing a quasi-police function, neutralizing undesirable so-called traditional practices by turning them into museum objects. The essayistic documentary Le terrain du peuple by Anja Göbel provides another account of this dynamic.9 In her film, she examines the consequences that the establishment of a national museum in Burkina Faso had on local government groups organized along tribal lines. In the national museum, each grouping represented in the state is given its own pavilion to establish a national imagination, and the nation-state has used this form of representation as a political tool to dissolve local forms of governance—the ‘terrain du peuple’ referred to in the film’s title. ‘In country after country,’ as James Oles writes in a book about the artist Eduardo Abaroa, who proposed the total destruction of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico, the nationalist projects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the relocation of cultural markers from archaeological sites to urban museums (Maya reliefs sent to Mexico City, Hittite bronzes to Ankara, Assyrian bulls to Mosul: the list is endless) in order to forge a national identity based on territory rather than direct ethnic descent or religious affiliation.10 While this secularizing role of the nation-state is generally known, less known are the concrete conflicts and the specific practices of domination that are associated with it. In regard to the Mexican context, the art historian and artist Mariana Botey asserts the following: This discipline [anthropology/archaeology] has played a central role in the ideological construction of the Nation State arguably to such an extent that the specific form of discourse that it has generated—Mexican indi-

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Daniel Herwitz, ‘Heritage and Legacy in the South African State and University’, in The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories, and Infrastructures, ed. Derek R. Peterson, Kodzo Gavua, Ciraj Rassool (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2015), 37–49. See the Le terrain du peuple website at: https://leterraindupeuple.wordpress.com. James Oles, ‘Museum Destruction’, in Eduardo Abaroa et al.,Total Destruction of the National Museum of Anthropology, ed. Jennifer Burris Staton (Mexico City: Athénée Press, 2017), 70.

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genismo—has not had the Indian as object of study, but the nation itself as its true and essential object.11 Botey’s suggestion responds to the contradiction of the nation performing a self-image that builds upon ancient indigenous communities and their heritage as it, at the same time, pursues a destructive politics towards contemporary indigenous communities and first nations. ‘The state’s emphasis on the importance of studying, archiving, and displaying indigenous cultures within the museum—or space of historical record—is matched by its neglect of those same cultures and people beyond the institution’s walls.’12 What is very obviously described here as a conflict emerges as well in the heart of Western democracies in the face of migration policy: on one level wanting to represent the world that remains excluded on another level. In this book, for instance, Mirjam Shatanawi shows the extent to which Jean Baptiste Vanmour’s paintings have been instrumentalized ‘as part of national policies to integrate Turkish migrants in the Netherlands.’ Although in this volume we turn primarily to areas where museums and cultural practices are more visibly in conflict, where the role of the museum has been and continues to be more contested, its range includes both the obvious and less obvious cases. A 1971 text by Stanislas Spero Adotevi (translated here) attests to the conflict that the global imposition of the museum form has meant for African countries. This tension, however, is also at the heart of so-called Western democracies. In a lecture on the recent topplings of monuments that occurred in major European cities in the course of the Black Lives Matter movement, Norman Ajari argues against the historical relativism that was vehemently deployed by French politicians in the case of the painting over of the pedestal of a statue of Jean-Baptiste Colbert.13 Colbert was

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Mariana Botey, Zonas de disturbio. Espectros del México indígena en la modernidad (Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores, 2014), 101. Here quoted from her text ‘Mining the ISA and Reversing Cultural Extractivism’ in Abaroa, Total Destruction, 116. Eduardo Abaroa and Jennifer Burris Staton, ‘Introduction’ in Abaroa, Total Destruction, 12. Norman Ajari, ‘Decolonial Iconoclasm’ (conference lecture at The White West IV: Whose Universal?, House of World Cultures, Berlin, 10 July 2021, organized by Kader Attia, Anselm Franke, and Ana Teixeira Pinto, https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/proj ekte/veranstaltung/p_178867.php, 46:44–1:13:00.) [lecture quotes are transcriptions by Susanne Leeb].

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finance minister under Louis XIV, responsible for laying the economic foundations of French colonialism and for inventing and implementing the Code Noir in 1685. The infamous Code Noir, with its sixty articles, regulated the treatment of slaves and was in force until 1848. On 23 June 2020, the Brigade Anti-Négrophobie (BAN) wrote ‘Négrophobie d’État’ (State Negrophobia) in red paint on the base of the Colbert statue that stands in front of the National Assembly in Paris. Ajari analyses the ‘contextualist argument’ (at 55′ of the webstream of the conference), which calls for taking into account the ‘context in which historical figures made decisions’ (54′50″). Ajari wonders to what extent this claim to context can be reconciled with the self-understanding of a nation-state whose foundations contradict everything the absolutist state represented and which itself was based on the overthrow of that very state. ‘To support Colbert amounts to supporting absolute monarchy, economic dirigisme, enriching the elite, absence of freedom of speech’, he asserts, concluding that ‘Colbertism is the absolute opposite of modern ideas’ (56′00″). The contextual argument might be a historian’s argument, Ajari maintains, but not a ‘political approach’, and he recalls what is known as Taubira Law, enacted by the former French Minister of Justice Christiane Taubira in 2001, a law that recognizes the Atlantic slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity. Why then, Ajari wonders, was there such an outcry against BAN on the part of French politicians? His answer, which is transferable to numerous other political contexts within the sphere of culture, is that the ‘contextualist’ defence of Colbert allows the fictional continuity of the nation-state into times predating its existence. It supports, as Ajari argues, the pure strength of the nation-state and the state’s fundamental attachment to white supremacy (see 1:08′). What Colbert provides us with, so he continues, is the production of the ‘white race as pure and superior’: ‘the idealized projection of us as pure whites and as heirs of an unchanging or powerful and sovereign state’ (1:11′). Since today’s museums are heirs and representatives of this history, the question arises as to what this means for transcultural museology, in times when museums have significantly changed their rhetoric. The question of ownership—who owns cultural heritage from a material perspective—is crucial in this context, since property rights are a political instrument of the nation-state. In her recent book Afrikas Kampf um seine Kunst (Africa’s fight for its art), Bénédicte Savoy shows how, with the independence and transformation of former colonies into nation-states, the great powers rushed to enact laws

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that immediately blocked possible claims for restitution.14 But the question of material possession is also particularly evident when state entities are divided into new nation-states and their collections thus divided as well (see Kavita Singh’s contribution to this volume). And it is evident in the continuous refusal, now only very slowly crumbling, to return artefacts looted during the period of colonialism and imperialism.15 The restitution issue has become more urgent since the 2018 Sarr-Savoy report. The still very unequal exchange between European and African and other formerly colonized territories that are now partners refracts through the question of property, not least because the nation-state is the decisive vehicle for negotiations on restitution. This is why Achille Mbembe has called for a distinction to be made between legal and ‘legitimate’ heirs in order to shift the discussion from law to ethics.16 What museums and exhibitions are there that take into account the fact of migration societies and provide alternative models of narrating transculturality without falling prey to a critique of, in this case, transnationalism that David Lloyd and Lisa Lowe formulated already in 1997: We understand the transnational to denote the stage of globalized capitalism characterized by David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, and others as the universal extension of a differentiated mode of production that relies on flexible accumulation and mixed production to incorporate all sectors of the global economy into its logic of commodification.17 But if transculturality is not to serve only to cover economies of enrichment, we want to ask: What is necessary to arrive at a non-idealistic understanding of transcultural art histories and museologies? What are the material conditions for transcultural art histories? What museums and exhibitions that take the fact of migratory societies into account operate alternative models 14 15 16

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See Bénédicte Savoy, Afrikas Kampf um seine Kunst. Geschichte einer postkolonialen Niederlage (Munich: Beck, 2021), especially the chapter titled ‘1965 Bingo’, 10–26. For the German context, see Savoy’s reconstruction of the history of refusal: Savoy, Afrikas Kampf. See Achille Mbembe, ‘Reflections on African Objects and Restitution in the TwentyFirst Century’, acceptance speech upon receiving the Gerda Henkel Prize, Düsseldorf, 8 October 2018, https://www.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/en/recipient-in-2018?page_id=9 9597. Printed in a slightly different version, in a German translation, in: Achille Mbembe, ‘Restitution ist nicht genug’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 9 October 2018, 11. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, ‘Introduction’, in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 1.

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of narrating transnational cultures and are not merely agents of the nationstate but rather actors of other conceptions of global coexistence? And here we begin again with Benedict Anderson’s question of national imagination. According to Hansen and Stepputat, the myth of the state is so persistent ‘because the state, or institutionalized sovereign government, remains pivotal in our very imagination of what a society is.’18 If other imaginaries play out at the level of signifiers, the question is how to get from signifiers to material conditions. We are not the first to ask this question. Wayne Modest and Helen Mears suggest that identifying the structures that discourage the inclusion of diverse populations and removing those from the museum organization; asking how collections can be used to combat societal prejudices and facilitate a better way of living with diversity; could serve as a more meaningful and impactful way to address the injustices embedded in society.19 In this volume, we do not follow a historical line that would show the role of the nation-state in different times as a historical development in the transition from the colonial to postcolonial state.20 Rather, we assemble historical as well as contemporary case studies that confront the necessary claim to and practices of transculturality, or even more broadly, a ‘worldliness’ (see Natasha Ginwala’s contribution to this volume) with the hidden or overt role of the nation-state. By compiling texts from different sociopolitical contexts, we hope to shed light on the elephant in the room of transculturality. Museums, to cast a more ambivalent light on the matter, stand in the middle of the ‘conflict zone’ (Kavita Singh) between at least two fields of force: their inherent transculturality, grounded in the most diverse forms of migration and violent transfer politics, and their role as the executing organ of a raison d’état. This contradiction underlies them, and the question arises as to how this can be overcome if the question of property, state power, and law is 18 19

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Hansen and Stepputat, States of Imagination, 1–2. Helen Mears and Wayne Modest, ‘Museums, African Collections and Social Justice’, in Museums, Equality and Social Justice, ed. Richard Sandell and Eithne Nightingale (London: Routledge, 2012), 308. For a reflection on what it would mean to pursue a postcolonial museum policy, see Susan Legêne, ‘Museums in a Post Colonial World: Plea for a Historical Critique of Exhibitions’ (paper given at the Museums Association Conference, Liverpool, 7 October 2008, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Susan-Legene/publication/299021823_ TOWARDS_A_HISTORICAL_EXHIBITION_CRITIQUE).

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not to reinscribe any narrative transgressing the national back into the frame of the national by praising an idealistic world-culturalism. This book at least allows contradiction to emerge—and the introduction by Nina Samuel goes into more detail about its individual contributions. We have assembled historical as well as contemporary case studies, ranging from the implementation of the nation-state qua art in North Macedonia (Suzana Milevska) to dealing with postmigrant societies in Australia (Andrea Witcomb), reporting on the complicated intertwining of different social forces, actors, and agencies in contemporary Guatemala (Sebastián Eduardo), to claiming one’s own history in Egypt (Monica Hanna). And with excerpts from Rajkamal Kahlon’s series Die Völker der Erde (People of the Earth) (2017–onward), we present a work of art that seeks to engage with ethnographic collections and the racisms stored in their archives—a racism which was also foundational for the nation-states founded in the nineteenth century.21

Bibliography Abaroa, Eduardo, et al. Total Destruction of the National Museum of Anthropology. Edited by Jennifer Burris Staton. Mexico City: Athénée Press, 2017. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge, 1995. Boltanski, Luc, and Arnaud Esquerre. ‘The Economic Life of Things’. New Left Review 98 (March/April 2016): 31–56. Boltanski, Luc, and Arnaud Esquerre. Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity, 2020. Botey, Mariana. ‘Mining the ISA and Reversing Cultural Extractivism’. In Abaroa, Total Destruction of the National Museum of Anthropology, 112–18. Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

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On the prominent investigation of another entanglement, see Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (New York: Verso, 1991) and its recent ‘rereading’: Manuela Bojadžijev and Katrin Klingan, eds., Balibar/Wallerstein’s ‘Race, Nation, Class’: Rereading a Dialogue for Our Times (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt; Argument Verlag, 2018).

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Golding, Viv, and Wayne Modest, eds. Museums and Communities: Curators, Collections, and Collaboration. London: Blooomsbury, 2013. Hansen, Thomas Blom, and Finn Stepputat, eds. States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Harney, Elizabeth. In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Herwitz, Daniel. ‘Heritage and Legacy in the South African State and University’. In The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories, and Infrastructures, edited by Derek R. Peterson, Kodzo Gavua, and Ciraj Rassool (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 37–49. Leeb, Susanne. ‘Local Time, Or the Presence of an Ancient Past’. Texte zur Kunst 105 (March 2017): 99–118 (in English and in German). Macdonald, Sharon. ‘Museums, National, Postnational and Transcultural Identities’. Museum and Society 1, no. 1 (2003): 1–16. Mbembe, Achille. ‘Reflections on African Objects and Restitution in the Twenty-First Century’. https://www.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/en/recipie nt-in-2018?page_id=99597. Oles, James. ‘Museum Destruction’. In Abaroa, Total Destruction of the National Museum of Anthropology, 57–72. Sarr, Felwine, and Bénédicte Savoy. ‘The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics’. Paris: Ministère de la Culture, November 2018. http://restitutionreport2018.com/sarr_savoy_en.pdf. Savoy, Bénédicte. Afrikas Kampf um seine Kunst. Geschichte einer postkolonialen Niederlage. Munich: Beck, 2021.

Introduction: Museum Narratives between Transculturality and the Nation-State From the Origins of this Book to a Short Survey of Its Contents Nina Samuel

This volume originated in the international conference ‘Narrating Culture(s) in Museums and Exhibitions’, held at Leuphana University Lüneburg in 2018. It was organized as part of the postgraduate research program PriMus–PhD in Museums (Promovieren im Museum), which was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the VDI/VDE Innovation + Technik GmbH (2017–2019). PriMus is a transdisciplinary doctoral training program that supports the collaborative generation of knowledge by museums and the university, opens up new perspectives on objects, and produces novel methods and exhibition practices.1 For this program, Leuphana University Lüneburg cooperated with six museums in the Hamburg region: Deichtorhallen Hamburg; Hamburger Kunsthalle; Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG); Museum am Rothenbaum–Kulturen und Künste der Welt (MARKK) in Hamburg; Buddenbrookhaus–Heinrich-und-Thomas-Mann-Zentrum in Lübeck; and Ostpreußisches Landesmuseum in Lüneburg. Six doctoral students worked on dissertations on undiscovered areas of a museum collection or on topics that were close to the focus of the museum’s collection; they also created curatorial concepts or designed an exhibition with the aim of bringing their research

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The results of the research program have been compiled in a manual aimed at facilitating the implementation of training programs that combine doctoral studies and museum practice; see Nina Samuel, Promovieren im Museum: Ein Leitfaden, ed. Susanne Leeb and Beate Söntgen (Lüneburg: Leuphana University, 2021), https://primus-leitfad en.web.leuphana.de/#2.

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topics closer to the general public. The collections of the six partner institutions include the fields of design, fine arts, literary history, cultural history, and ethnography. A supporting program of seminars, colloquia, workshops, lectures, excursions, and the aforementioned international conference deepened and broadened the knowledge and insights gained at the museums. The goals of the program were to bring together the specific forms of knowledge of the university and the museum, to combine doctoral studies with museological skills, to change research practices, and to foster scholarly exchange amongst museums of different disciplines. Engagement with museum practices anchors visual and spatial thinking and reasoning as an important part of the academic curriculum. The program was founded on the assumption that academic practice changes through a material-based examination of research questions and theories. Becoming familiar with practices of the museum such as inventory, documentation, and conservation also changes how one understands a scientific source. It is the interactions between theory and practice—or, more specifically, between theoretical reflections and material-based knowledge, or between the spatial thinking of exhibition design and the practical methods of both academia and the museum—that lay bare the processes of this type of knowledge formation in which museum objects and their materiality actively take part. The fundamental characteristic of museum objects is to always be part of a negotiation process: between cultural techniques, production, and conservation practices; between disciplinary conventions and those of social micro-milieus; and between economic and political driving forces. In this arena of heterogeneous dynamics and entanglements, different constellations emerge between the imaginary of the nation, the notion of transculturality, and the museum. One of the central themes of our conference ‘Narrating Culture(s) in Museums and Exhibitions’ was that museums do not only participate in this distinct form of cultural formation by de- and recontextualizing objects from different eras, fields, and geographies; they also produce narratives about culture(s) within their specific frameworks. In one of the panels, titled ‘Negotiating National Narratives’, the question of the often-hidden significance of the nation-state for the museum emerged as urgent, especially at a time when discourses on transculturality are becoming increasingly prevalent.2 The in2

In this context, an interesting analysis of the proliferation of nation-states in the age of globalization can be found in Egbert Jahn, ‘Die wundersame Vermehrung der Nation-

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quiry into the narratives that are considered constitutive of the imaginary of the nation, as well as the exploration of their impact on physical and political space, became one of the guiding themes for this volume.3 By interrogating the narratives in which museums, via their collections and exhibitions, play a role as supposed agents of social transformation and liberal cultural values, we aim to challenge normative ideas about what culture is, how it is experienced, and how it offers models of social identification. This approach enables us to draw on scholarly literature that links the imaginary of the nation-state to narrativity. Homi K. Bhabha describes the narratives of the nation as a symbolic force and cultural space characterized by the performativity and ambivalence of language. Bhabha is influenced by Benedict Anderson, particularly by his groundbreaking book Imagined Communities, and relies on Anderson’s notion that the imaginary structure of the modern nation-state was ‘embodied in the narrative culture of the realist novel’.4 Although museums and collections play a role in Anderson’s argument, the question of the relation between concrete museum objects, their modes of display, and the formation of these imagined communities is not at the centre of his analysis.5 This question, however, is amongst those central

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alstaaten im Zeitalter der Globalisierung’, in Politische Streitfragen, vol. 4, Weltpolitische Herausforderungen (Wiesbaden: Springer 2015), 13–31. For a recent connection between the museum and narratives, see Johanna Stapelfeldt, Ulrike Vedder, and Klaus Wiehl, eds., Museales Erzählen. Dinge, Räume, Narrative (Paderborn: Brill; Fink 2020). For an overview on different points of view on narrative theory, see John Pier and José Angel García Landa, eds., Theorizing Narrativity (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008). For a practice-based attempt to link ‘narrativity’—or, degrees of ‘storyness’—to exhibition design, see Patricia Austin, ‘Scales of Narrativity’, in Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions, eds. Suzanne MacLeod, Laura Hourston Hanks, and Jonathan Hale (London: Routledge, 2012), 107–18. For an analysis of the relation of space and narratives, see Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu, Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016); see especially the chapter ‘Museum Narratives’, 180–205. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’, in Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 2; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2016). Previously published studies on how specifically museums participate in the construction of national identities and narratives include: Flora Edouwaye S. Kaplan, Museums and the Making of ‘Ourselves’: The Role of Objects in National Identity (London: Leicester University Press, 1994); Brandon Taylor, Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London Public, 1747–2001 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999); Flora Edouwaye S.

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to this volume. All its case studies stay close to the objects, albeit to varying degrees and on different levels, for instance, by analysing how those objects are embedded in exhibition scenography and in collections, by questioning objects’ material integrity, or by considering their physical location and ownership as well as their performative dimension in public space. Through an examination of the selection of objects and their spatial relation to one another, Sharon Macdonald attests to museums’ fundamental ability to possess the necessary ‘serendipity’ and ‘fuzzy logic’ to represent open, hybrid, and transcultural concepts of identity.6 The transcultural logic of exhibitions she examines is one of ‘connections’ that can be ‘conceptualised as movement, as process, as creative agency’.7 Connections are made possible through a logic of encounters. This consideration (or hypothesis) is also central to our book. The following introduction of its texts does not follow their order in the table of contents but rather organizes the contributions in terms of questions of narration, nation, display, and encounters.

6 7

Kaplan, ‘Making and Remaking National Identities’, in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 152–69; David Boswell and Jessica Evans, Representing the Nation: A Reader—Histories, Heritage, and Museums (London: Routledge, 1999); Rosalind P. Blakesley, ‘Art, Nationhood, and Display: Zinaida Volkonskaia and Russia’s Quest for a National Museum of Art’, Slavic Review 67, no. 4 (2008): 912–33; Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, ‘Art Museums and Cultural Politics in Nigeria’, in Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch der Guernica Gesellschaft, vol. 13, Museum und Politik—Allianzen und Konflikte, ed. Anna Greve (Gottingen: V&R unipress, 2011): 129–39; Wolfram Kaiser, Stefan Krankenhagen, and Kerstin Poehls, Exhibiting Europe in Museums: Transnational Networks, Collections, Narratives and Representations (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014); Pamela Erskine-Loftus, Victoria Penziner Hightower, and Mariam Ibrahim AlMulla, eds., Representing the Nation: Heritage, Museums, National Narratives, and Identity in the Arab Gulf States (New York: Routledge, 2016); M. Victoria Gorham, ‘Displaying the Nation: Museums and Nation-Building in Tanzania and Kenya’, African Studies Review 63, no. 3 (2020): 487–517. Case studies on the tension and interdependency between transnational and national forces in museums can be found in Andrea Meyer and Bénédicte Savoy, eds., Contact Zones, vol. 1, The Museum is Open: Towards a Transnational History of Museums 1750–1940 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014). For a perspective on gender constructions in the context of a critique of museums and national identities, see Lisa Spanka, Vergegenwärtigungen von Geschlecht und Nation im Museum (Berlin: Transkript, 2019). Sharon J. Macdonald, ‘Museums, National, Postnational and Transcultural Identities’, Museum and Society 1, no. 1 (2003): 10. Macdonald, ‘Museums’, 9. Her case study was performed in an art exhibition.

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I. Three contributions are especially concerned with the way arguments can be made via the spatial connections of objects in the exhibition space. They propose a relational analysis between national and transcultural or other alternative narratives in three different contexts: Australia, the Netherlands, and South Asia. Starting from the hypothesis of a causal link between a ‘cosmopolitized world’, on the one hand, and the return of narrow, nationalistic mindsets, on the other, Andrea Witcomb tackles the entanglement of cosmopolitan and multicultural discourses with migration histories in Australian museums.8 In three close readings of exhibition displays from 1984 to 2007, she focuses on the relations between people and place and investigates how exhibitions can ‘help to overcome rising xenophobia and encourage a cosmopolitan ethic’. By paying particular attention to issues of voice—who is speaking, for whom, and how—and to the ways in which social interactions between different groups are depicted, Witcomb presents the experience of living with difference and cross-cultural encounters as a curatorial alternative to a portrayal of diversity that uses ethnicity as means of representation or to an adherence to concepts of cultural identity. The next contribution turns to the history of collections and individual objects. In her analysis of constructions of Islam at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Mirjam Shatanawi shows that museum objects have an inherent explosive power that undermines categorical classifications and defies any 8

For the relationship between multiculturalism und transculturality, see Wolfgang Welsch, ‘Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today’, in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (London: Sage, 1999), 194–213. On the tension between the nation-state anchoring of museums and the attempts to nevertheless present cosmopolitan narratives, see Peggy Levitt, Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), and the reply to this point of view in Ien Ang, ‘What Are Museums For? The Enduring Friction between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 24, no. 1 (2017): 1–5. However, a sharp definition of the relationship between cosmopolitan, multicultural, and transcultural discourses in museums is still a desideratum. On immigration museums as ‘laboratories for the narrative (self) portrayal of multicultural societies and productive fields for the study of (national) identity work under conditions of cultural diversity,’ see Joachim Baur, ‘Staging Migration—Staging the Nation. Imagining Community at Immigration Museums’, in Berlin Studies of the Ancient World, vol. 45, Between Memory Sites and Memory Networks: New Archaeological and Historical Perspectives, ed. Kerstin P. Hoffman, Reinhard Bernbeck, and Ulrike Sommer (Berlin: Edition Topoi, 2017), 341–57.

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narrow national attributions. She uses Jean Baptiste Vanmour’s paintings as a case study to unfold a history of inclusion and exclusion between Western and non-Western museum objects—objects that can be described as paradigmatic examples of the development of the public museum in the nineteenth century. A close reading of their institutional history of being categorized as either ethnographic or art objects, as well as their instrumentalization for different narratives, fundamentally challenges still-common museum taxonomies. Through her analysis of their transcultural nature and in-betweenness, as she calls it, it becomes evident how powerful close engagement with the museum objects, their materiality, modes of display, narratives, and biography can be in working to realize the idea of a global and decolonized museum. The history of the museum as a history of divisions and separations is further emphasized by Kavita Singh in her case study on three national museums of South Asia, revealing the great importance of the concept of the nation-state in decolonized countries. The story of the physical disassembling of a necklace leads to the entangled histories of different ideologies and self-narrations of the three neighbouring countries of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and their three national museums. The repurposing of originally colonial museums created places where constructions of a new national identity were supposed to emerge through a careful selection and staging of cultural heritage. By showing how continuity with the ancient past is constructed to produce national narratives, Singh makes clear how crucial it is to draw attention specifically to the display of objects and the scenography of exhibitions, which have the power to make arguments tangible via spatial thinking. II. Thinking in public urban spaces guides the reflections of two articles in particular. The contributions, one on North Macedonia and the other on Guatemala, link questions of performing national(istic) narratives with issues of cultural identity. Both case studies address a tension created by government actions in public spaces that expose the extent to which identity issues are dependent on power structures. Suzana Milevska takes the Macedonian government’s 2014 urban planning project in Skopje and the public reactions and protests against it as the starting point for her ‘psychoanalytical interpretation of the ultranationalist cultural policy’. Her research deals with trauma, with productive shame as agency, and with the relation of material culture to the realms of the symbolic, imaginary, and ‘real’. Through newly erected monuments to the coun-

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try’s distant nationalist past, the government attempted to rewrite collective memory and invent new narratives. Milevska points to the potential for creating micronarratives and counternarratives to reassert one’s own public space in the form of participatory institutional critique of heritage politics. Public space as a staging ground for governmentally imposed concepts of identity also forms the starting point for the reflections of Sebastián Eduardo Dávila. He notes that the Guatemalan government’s attempts to perform cultural diversity (or the ‘aim of representing the new, multicultural image of the postwar nation-state’) resulted instead in a public demonstration of the unresolved tensions between the nation-state and Mayanness, the identity of the indigenous population. To explore the complex relation of the nation, the state, and indigeneity, he analyses six different objects of the Colección Poyón, an artists’ collection founded and first exhibited on the occasion of the 2014 Bienal de Arte Paiz. Since the experiences and perspectives gathered in collections can influence social processes and interactions of everyday life, as Eduardo notes, they can also act as a corrective to national narratives and colonial legacies. III. Two authors continue to delve into the power of individual contemporary artworks and of curatorial strategies to break up narratives and power relations. Both contributions emphasize the individual perspective, one of a curator and the other of an artist. Natasha Ginwala takes us on a personal journey to specific positions in contemporary art and reflects on the curator’s task. Tracing the African diaspora’s mode of existence, with all its asymmetries of power, and making it a central concern of her essay, Ginwala quotes Jason Young: ‘If ships are a central organizing symbol for black life in the diaspora—and if the emergence of novel navigational and shipbuilding techniques in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries made the slave trade and, by extension, our own era of modernity possible—the actual vessels remain little more than a ghostly presence’.9 For Ginwala, the role of the curator is above all that of a close observer and listener who knows how to detect those ‘ghostly presences’ in order to make ‘polyphonous narrative structures’ visible in museums and exhibitions. With this, Ginwala touches on a core aspect of our book. It is exactly this ‘ghostly 9

Jason Young, ‘Windward: Toward the Life Cycle of the African Diaspora’, in The Museum of Rhythm, eds. Natasha Ginwala and Daniel Muzyczuk (Berlin: Sternberg; Museum Sztuki, Łódź, 2017).

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presence’ of material culture mediating between symbolic and cultural techniques, between imagined communities and political agendas, that can be taken as a visual leitmotif for the overarching questions of this volume. For this reason, we used a drawing of Yinka Shonibare’s public sculpture Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle (2010) for the book cover. Elevated, monumentalized, and unapproachably hovering above public life, his model of HMS Victory, the oldest ship in British naval service, had been temporarily installed in one of London’s busiest places, Trafalgar Square, as if the model’s outsized presence in public space would make unmistakable the relevance of studying material culture for tracing asymmetrical power relations resulting from European expansion. The second contribution is of a more visual than textual nature. The partial reprint of Rajkamal Kahlon’s series Die Völker der Erde (Peoples of the Earth) invites us to engage with a unique artistic point of view that opposes violent and racist colonial narratives in anthropological books and that returns agency to the represented, as Ruth Stamm notes in her introduction to the reprint. IV. Conflict (or, perhaps, friction) can arise between tangible and intangible heritage when the claims of the museum as institution collide with the social realities and lived traditions outside the confines of the museum. This issue is examined in two contributions that focus on the African continent. Taking the bust of Nefertiti from the collection of the Neues Museum in Berlin as an example, Monica Hanna demonstrates how closely the question of restitution can be linked to Egypt’s identification with its own history and with its cultural ties to ancient heritage, on the one hand, and with contemporary society, on the other. Narratives of a cultural continuity between the country’s past and present—or, as Hanna calls it, ‘repatriating cultural identity’—are revealed to be crucial for the distribution of power in the field of Egyptian heritage and in terms of legitimizing ownership of museum objects. Cultural narratives are an intangible heritage that directly impacts the locations of tangible heritage. In the end, a still-open and relevant question remains—as Stanislas Spero Adotevi, already in the 1970s, formulated it from the perspective of African countries—namely, whether it is finally time to forget old narratives of the museum in order to give space to new ones that embody a ‘humane museological practice’ and a ‘responsible culture’, as opposed to focusing on the paradigm of heritage preservation as its only justification. For this, according to Adotevi, the museum must be strengthened as an experimental space and

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laboratory of activities that are close to people’s real lives and that leaves behind any narratives of cultural superiority. Instead of a museum perceived as the antithesis of the ‘fabric of human life’, Adotevi calls for a new museology and demands that the museum as we know it disappear. With this collection of essays, through historical and contemporary spotlights on the conflicted relationships between the museum, transculturality, and the nation-state, we hope to contribute to the ongoing quest for a renewal of the museum and its narratives. The editor acknowledges the support of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Matters of Activity: Image Space Material’ funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2025 – 390648296.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 2016. Ang, Ien. ‘What Are Museums For? The Enduring Friction between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism’. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 24, no. 1 (2017): 1–5. Austin, Patricia. ‘Scales of Narrativity’. In Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions, edited by Suzanne MacLeod, Laura Hourston Hanks, and Jonathan Hale, 107–18. London: Routledge, 2012. Baur, Joachim. ‘Staging Migration—Staging the Nation. Imagining Community at Immigration Museums’. In Berlin Studies of the Ancient World. Vol. 45, Between Memory Sites and Memory Networks: New Archaeological and Historical Perspectives, edited by Kerstin P. Hoffman, Reinhard Bernbeck, and Ulrike Sommer, 341–57. Berlin: Edition Topoi, 2017. Bhabha, Homi K. ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’. In Nation and Narration, 1–7. London: Routledge, 1990. Blakesley, Rosalind P. ‘Art, Nationhood, and Display: Zinaida Volkonskaia and Russia’s Quest for a National Museum of Art’. Slavic Review 67, no. 4 (2008): 912–33. Boswell, David, and Jessica Evans. Representing the Nation: A Reader—Histories, Heritage, and Museums. London: Routledge, 1999. Erskine-Loftus, Pamela, Victoria Penziner Hightower, Mariam Ibrahim AlMulla, eds. Representing the Nation: Heritage, Museums, National Narratives, and Identity in the Arab Gulf States. New York: Routledge, 2016.

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Gorham, M. Victoria. ‘Displaying the Nation: Museums and Nation-Building in Tanzania and Kenya’. African Studies Review 63, no. 3 (2020): 487–517. Jahn, Egbert. ‘Die wundersame Vermehrung der Nationalstaaten im Zeitalter der Globalisierung’. In Politische Streitfragen. Vol. 4, Weltpolitische Herausforderungen, 13–31. Wiesbaden: Springer 2015. Kaiser, Wolfram, Stefan Krankenhagen, and Kerstin Poehls. Exhibiting Europe in Museums: Transnational Networks, Collections, Narratives and Representations. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. Kaplan, Flora Edouwaye S. Museums and the Making of ‘Ourselves’: The Role of Objects in National Identity. London: Leicester University Press, 1994. Kaplan, Flora Edouwaye S. ‘Making and Remaking National Identities’. In A Companion to Museum Studies, edited by Sharon Macdonald, 152–69. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. Levitt, Peggy. Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Macdonald, Sharon J. ‘Museums, National, Postnational and Transcultural Identities’. Museum and Society 1, no. 1 (2003): 1–16. Meyer, Andrea, and Bénédicte Savoy, eds. Contact Zones. Vol. 1, The Museum is Open: Towards a Transnational History of Museums 1750–1940. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Ogbechie, Sylvester Okwunodu: ‘Art Museums and Cultural Politics in Nigeria’. In Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch der Guernica Gesellschaft. Vol. 13, Museum und Politik—Allianzen und Konflikte, edited by Anna Greve, 129–39. Gottingen: V&R unipress, 2011. Pier, John, and José Angel García Landa, eds. Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. Ryan, Marie-Laure, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu. Narrating Space/ Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016. Spanka, Lisa. Vergegenwärtigungen von Geschlecht und Nation im Museum. Berlin: Transkript, 2019. Stapelfeldt, Johanna, Ulrike Vedder, and Klaus Wiehl, eds. Museales Erzählen. Dinge, Räume, Narrative. Paderborn: Brill; Fink 2020. Taylor, Brandon. Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London Public, 1747–2001. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Young, Jason. ‘Windward: Toward the Life Cycle of the African Diaspora’. In The Museum of Rhythm, edited by Natasha Ginwala and Daniel Muzyczuk. Berlin: Sternberg; Museum Sztuki, Łódź, 2017.

‘Come On Home’ Insistent Presences and Diasporic Selves Natasha Ginwala To be in love means to be worldly, to be in connection with significant otherness and signifying others, on many scales, in layers of locals and globals, in ramifying webs. ― Donna Haraway1

Insistent Presences I noticed the phrase ‘insistent presences’, coined by Martinican poet, writer, and intellectual Édouard Glissant, in a two-part project by artist-filmmakers Filipa Cesár and Louis Henderson called Sunstone and Refracted Spaces (2017/2018). Glissant’s text was placed under the curved weight of a fresnel lens; these lenses are used as part of lighthouse technology and are now quietly going out of production, made obsolete in the time of GPS navigation and dense infrastructures of choke points in undersea cable networks. Yet, the lighthouse as a protagonist has been fundamental to projects of imperial expansion—as the prismatic throw of light guiding passage by sea, charting the terrain of coastal histories and Enlightenment philosophy. The artistfilmmakers, however, equally address the shadow zones of what lies beyond the glow of this mercantile-military apparatus standing at shorelines across the world. That is, the optics of colonial modernity and media archaeology of global connectivity as an ultimate terror of transparency, which exposes lives of the oppressed and colonized.

1

Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 97.

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Fig. 1: Filipa César and Louis Henderson, Sunstone, 2018. Singlechannel video, colour with sound. Installation view at Colomboscope 2019, ‘Sea Change’.

Photograph by Ruvin de Silva.

Jason Young notes, ‘If ships are a central organizing symbol for black life in the diaspora—and if the emergence of novel navigational and shipbuilding techniques in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries made the slave trade and, by extension, our own era of modernity possible—the actual vessels remain little more than a ghostly presence.’2 The lighthouse lens is hence far greater than an infrastructure; it signals the asymmetries of power and dispersal, as it stands along the edges of oceanic bodies that have been darker realms of death and enslavement but also of diasporas, botanical transit, systems of faith, linguistic alchemy, and transcontinental economies. In Glissant’s magnified and prescient words observed through the installation Refracted Spaces, we may read of contagion and co-dependencies that invite us to continue marking place as anchor point and sourcing one’s subjectivity ‘in the presence of all the languages in the world.’3 As Haraway notes 2

3

Jason Young, ‘Windward: Toward the Life Cycle of the African Diaspora’, in The Museum of Rhythm, ed. Natasha Ginwala and Daniel Muzyczuk (Berlin: Sternberg; Museum Sztuki, Łódź, 2017). Édouard Glissant and Alexandre Leupin, The Baton Rouge Interviews, trans. Katie M. Cooper (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 44.

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in the quote that opens this essay, to practise relatedness is to be multiscalar, not in an extractive sense of casting a militaristic net to capture or hinder the many forms of life, but rather to convene at the crossroads where mutual care, recognition of difference, and refuge unleash ramifying webs wherein human affect is a generative formation such that ‘To be in love is to be worldly’.

Pieces of Worlds There appears to be an overdetermined use of the term diversity within the domain of European institutional politics these days. And yet, worldliness is a condition that requires far greater commitments towards a co-evolution of the present and an interweaving of reparation, unlearning, and communality in the shifting registers of storing, sustaining, and disseminating cultural knowledge. It is worth visiting the term as Glissant expressed it: Diversity, which is neither chaos nor sterility, means the human spirit’s striving for a cross-cultural relationship, without universalist transcendence. Diversity needs the presence of peoples, no longer as objects to be swallowed up, but with the intention of creating a new relationship. Sameness requires fixed Being, Diversity establishes Becoming.4 The Western museum’s foundation as embedded in turbulent ‘civilizing processes’ and simultaneous erasure of indigenous authorship/ownership protocols may perhaps be seen as complementary, to a degree, with the lighthouse, as ‘navigation’ systems that evolved through imperial networks of exposure, transplantation, pillaging, replication, and punishment. Inside museal architecture there often lies a forced sterility and a ‘fixed Being’, where artefacts, documents, dioramas, and object-subjects (especially in ethnographic collections) become shorn of stories and biographies, governed in the name of caretaking and investment unto the sustenance of a timeless monument to cultural representation. The debates around restitution often encircle specific items and become a point of geopolitical contestation amidst competing national interests while also wrestling with flawed conceptions around the ‘common inheri-

4

Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash, CARAF Books (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 98.

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tance of humanity’5 remaining impervious to imperial crimes—such as the Elgin marbles, the Koh-i-noor, or a bust of Nefertiti. However, the broader structural concerns that recur, especially over the past decade in museum environments, are towards radically imagining reciprocal modalities and polyphonous narrative structures that stand as a counterpoint to the centripetal velocity of an imperial model such as the universal museum.6 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay posits, ‘Restitution is not just about property but about a share in the common world.’7 In their seminal report calling for a relational ethics towards African cultural heritage, Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr note: To fall under the spell of an object, to be touched by it, moved emotionally by a piece of art in a museum, brought to tears of joy, to admire its forms of ingenuity, to like the artworks’ colors, to take a photo of it, to let oneself be transformed by it: all these experiences—which are also forms of access to knowledge—cannot simply be reserved to the inheritors of an asymmetrical history, to the benefactors of an excess of privilege and mobility.8 It is evident that preserving the creative heritage of humankind within erstwhile colonial capitals of the world without participatory forms of interpretation and dismantling the fault lines of paternalistic white supremacy perpetuates fields of disempowerment between the maker, the envoy, and the receiver. When the taker poses as caretaker, only corrupted notions of care will proliferate,9 such that the testimonial burden of violence lies with the colonized and those cultural actors conceiving artistic ferment, social experimentation, and ‘practices in liveability’ within so-called developing economies as well as (post)migrant societies. Artists Antje Majewski and Olivier Guesselé-Garai investigate the cultural commodification of objects, auratic value, and communal uses in the tradi-

5 6 7 8

9

See Neil MacGregor, ‘Oi, Hands Off Our Marbles’, Sunday Times, 18 January 2004. In conversation with Naman Ahuja as part of Experimenter Curators’ Hub 2020. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019), 337. Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, ‘The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics’ (Paris: Ministère de la Culture, November 2018), http://restitu tionreport2018.com/sarr_savoy_en.pdf. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, The Delusions of Care (Berlin: Archive Books, 2020). Gratitude to all of the SAVVY team, on whom much of my ongoing learning and sense of home in the city of Berlin relies.

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tional arts of Cameroon.10 In their installation at the group show And Berlin Will Always Need You at Gropius Bau (2019)11 they examined new economies created around craft artefacts, better understood as complex vocabularies of the handmade, including pearl weaving, pikuran (cache-sexe) beadwork, and basketry, tracing the journey of these objects from their makers to the ruling elite and to tourist-packed museums in the Global North, especially Germany. The painting and video Le trône (The Throne) (2019) by Majewski involves several interviews with artists, anthropologists, and museum professionals in Cameroon and also includes an audience with Sultan El Hadj Ibrahim Mbombo Njoya, the grandson of Sultan Ibrahim Njoya, whose throne was purportedly gifted during the German colonial enterprise and is currently held in the ethnographic collection of the Berlin State Museums. The royal throne of Bamum is considered in its multivalent meanings as ancestral heritage with legendary potency, artisanal object rooted in a communal matrix, emblem of betrayal amidst local powers, and contested museum artefact held in storage. Majewski and Guesselé-Garai engage with the use of artisanal techniques in contemporary arts practice and the status of objects across different economic spheres, from the local bazaar to online marketing channels. They question the transformation in meaning, function, and value that takes place when, since the time of European colonialism in Africa and continuing to the present, certain charged objects have been transported to Europe and wrested away from local stakeholders (that is, the community that is innate to and surrounds the object/living practice) to be exhibited, archived, and preserved in Western museums. Such artistic interventions address material cultures via the double consciousness of historiography to compose new forms of visual literacy and contrapuntal mapping. They interrogate the circuit of indebtedness in our era of molecular colonialism.12

10 11

12

‘Les Cache-Sexe, 2017’, Antje Majewski website, http://www.antjemajewski.de/portfoli o/the-shadow-of-the-sun/. ‘And Berlin Will Always Need You: Art, Craft and Concept Made in Berlin; 22 March to 16 June 2019’, Berliner Festspiele website, https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/berline r-festspiele/programm/bfs-gesamtprogramm/programmdetail_274526.html. Margarida Mendes, ‘Molecular Colonialism: Consumption and Growth under Climate Austerity’, Anthropocene Curriculum website, 29 May 2017, https://www.anthropocene -curriculum.org/contribution/molecular-colonialism.

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In the exhibition Errata at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona,13 Azoulay puts into practice part of the thesis of her book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, setting forth insurgent historiographies amidst imperial publications premised upon violent extractivism and photographic archives that push a certain trope of realism in museum collections as documentary record. She reminds the viewer that the invention of the citizen took place in parallel with the invention of the refugee and the infiltrator. These hierarchical categories are used in ways that serve regimes by imposing gestures in legitimation, revivalism, and rejection towards future imperial progress, operating as directives of enclosure and fortification against ‘undocumented’ communities such as asylum seekers. What would it take to structure object records and photographic chronicles attendant to this measure of forced and unforced mobility? Azoulay proposes a reversal of imperial rights and proposes the notion of ‘worldly rights’—from ‘the right to’ to ‘the right not to’—as the basis for a politics of restitution that should replace the pursuit of progress driven by the centuries-old history of capitalism and empire. The active renegotiation at this juncture of asymmetrical history-telling across art historical paradigms, art-making, and museum practices needs to be understood as a subjective exercise in inventing new tools, propositional actions that require a circulation and aeration of material culture(s), and restorative models of curricula rather than detrimental proposals anchored in an end-ism. For a linear teleology that hurtles towards termination of a cultural model/life is another flawed inheritance from colonial modernity. The collective, or rather, the self-declared ‘public secret society’ New Red Order (NRO), led by Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, explores the desirous and resistance-based grounds of indigeneity while subversively enrolling the legacy of ‘informants’ as modes of glitch and mimetic interruption in the business as usual that erodes sovereign cosmologies as well as commodifies indigenous knowledge in the face of an earth-system in deep turmoil. Last year, as protestors toppled Confederate statues and Christopher Columbus monuments were removed, NRO’s video Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality gained a vibrancy as it asked the ‘what-if’ question of this burning moment: What if colonial-era monuments such as James Earle Fraser’s 1918 bronze sculpture End of the Trail are seen not as stable icons of occupation over 13

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, ‘Errata’, exh. broch., Fundació Antoni Tàpies, October 2019, http s://fundaciotapies.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ENG_Ariella_Azoulay-Errata.pdf.

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indigenous people but as active fields of distortion? Rather than conceding to a genocidal origin story of the United States, the statue is seen as a composite of raw meat that scatters away from the forced processes of commemoration; its contours are instead seen dissolving and rotting. On the screen, between 3D mutations of End of the Trail and Fraser’s sculpture of Theodore Roosevelt, a message appears: ‘To erect a statue is to enact revenge on reality. And reality in turn exacts its due …’14 In foregrounding a transformative theory of justice, Denise Ferreira da Silva reflects: Asking a what-if question is necessary precisely because any plan for decolonization that aims at global justice—that is, the return of the total value expropriated from native lands and slave labor under the regime of total violence—cannot depend on modern knowledge and its tools.15 While a turn towards restructuring the terms of inclusivity, divestment, and redistribution is bound to produce a shattering effect, let us consider how the splinters, organic residues, and pieces of worlds that have been are passageways towards recomposition—building vocabularies that privilege collective memory-keeping, cultural promiscuity, leakages into new forms of ownership that steer away from national patrimony, and, eventually, a horizontal staging of wisdom(s) that sustain a commoning of planetary resources as a truly creative gesture.

Meeting in Itinerancy Not only me, All of us are strangers, Otherwise how can we explain the city? —Ghayath Almadhoun, ‘The City’ in Adrenalin, 2017

14

15

Anna Harsanyi, ‘New Red Order and the Complexity of Process’, International Studio and Curatorial Program website, 23 December 2020, https://iscp-nyc.org/journal/newred-order-and-the-critical-process-at-work. Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘Speculations on a Transformative Theory of Justice’, Hearings, 11 April 2017, http://hearings.contour8.be/2017/04/11/speculations-transformative-theo ry-justice/.

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Fig. 2: Akinbode Akinbiyi, Sea Never Dry, 1980s–ongoing. Installation view of Six Songs, Swirling Gracefully in The Taut Air, curated by Natasha Ginwala at Gropius Bau, Berlin, 2020.

Photograph by Muhammad Salah.

Berlin-based Nigerian artist-photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi engages with the lens to study forms of belonging and alienation, seeking out the familiar across distinct horizons of metropolises and coastlines from Dakar to Chicago to Athens, and from Johannesburg to Bamako. His photographic corpus lends an ear to vivid and disquieting image-worlds, becoming a stranger, observing strangers and the strangeness of places we call home. The photographer is a stranger who gains know-how through the ways he weaves through crowds, everyday infrastructures, and urban detritus. In his gait there appears a unity of elements—between ambulatory rhythms, the breathing body, and the built environment. His durational series form a kind of ‘Handbook in Motion’. The American critic, activist, and eminent writer on photography Susan Sontag described photographs as ‘miniatures of reality’, and in this vein Akinbiyi’s pursuit involves collecting fragments of the world that are often refused, marginalized, and stubbornly active in the effort of communal survival. The epic series Lagos: All Roads (1980s–ongoing) plots the many moods and faces of Akinbiyi’s ‘home’ city and Africa’s largest metropolis. Created as its peripatetic inhabitant, the photographer wholly senses this terrain through both distance and proximity. The viewer experiences these image sequences as con-

‘Come On Home’

tiguous and open-ended. Yet, the megacity is never fully grasped or circumnavigated, since it is in a continuous phase of reinvention and collapse. Akinbiyi’s protagonists are rarely captured frontally; instead, they are seen as part of a communal horizon, jostling between civic infrastructure and pursuits of dreaming. Rarely has a photographer journeyed this extensively to carve out an encyclopaedic suite of images consistently tracing realities across the African world and beyond. While Roy DeCarava portrayed images of African American visual culture, jazz maestros, and his Harlem neighbourhood from the late 1940s as visual poems and living expressions interweaving the beauty, struggle, and dignity of black lives, Akinbiyi equally contemplates a range of life conditions in a scale of greys—the tranquil and the furious.16 Throughout this drawn-out pandemic temporality, I have been thinking about the notion of homecoming. How this act is in fact not about steady arrivals but rather of where refuge can be taken as a marker of not being alone in the struggles of living and, moreover, where the sensation of shame leaves the body-mind. In listening to the track ‘Come on Home’ by the Lijadu Sisters, which has become a personal anthem, I entwine James Baldwin’s provocation: ‘Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.’17 The harmonics of this sister duo are a plea to homecoming, sung in English and Yoruba set to bass guitar and drum sequences, urging for difference without separability,18 speaking against the fear and uncertainty that are the staples of modern racial grammar. Last July marked a decade since I moved to Europe and began practicing as an international curator. I became a seasonal visitor to the country of my passport, India, forged a stronger relationship with the subcontinent, and composed an island home in Sri Lanka. Yet, the world as we know it now is a place of entrapment in many respects, and such a triangulation is nerve-racking. The privilege and ease (to put it optimistically) of forming an elastic community that stretches between borders, institutional formats, and disciplinary terrain is now in a phase of negotiation, even implosion to an extent—but perhaps a certain renewal is underway that we cannot 16

17 18

Natasha Ginwala, ‘Introduction: Six Songs, Swirling Gracefully in the Taut Air; Curator Natasha Ginwala on Akinbode Akinbiyi’s Solo Exhibition at the Gropius Bau’, Berliner Festspiele website, February 2020, https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/gropiusbau/p rogramm/2020/akinbode-akinbiyi/einf%C3%BChrung.html. James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (New York: Penguin Classics, 2001). Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘On Difference without Separability’, in 32a São Paulo Art Bienal, ‘Incerteza viva’ [Live uncertainty], exh. cat., ed. Jochen Volz, Júlia Rebouças, and Isabella Rjeille (São Paulo: Fundaçāo Bienal Sāo Paulo, 2016), 57–65.

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yet fully comprehend. As we continue participating in world-making/unmaking, in uneven and increasingly regulated ways, I believe the task of a curator is listening deeper to what has been simmering, rumbling, and cracking beneath and amidst us. To be willing to renew the terms of the present deadlock involves capacitating homecoming as ways of being otherwise, as wild contours of praxis inside potential elsewhere(s). Artists assemble the ‘insistent presences’—ghostly and material—that structure plural visions, scores, and mappings to pursue readings beyond individualist and insular relations to the disjoined present day. Itinerancy as patterns of movement has been definitive of art histories and counterculture flows; these narratives are not about hidden lives needing to be discovered by the market or scholarship but are rather to commence study and dispersal of thought models as anchored in the very sources of cosmopolitan lives, diasporic networks, and nodes of coexistence as living archives that have always already been t/here. Fred Moten writes, When being-in-the-world is who you are, and who you are is what you own, and what you own is where and when you are, then what it is to have been taken and to have been made to leave, which marks again and again the already inexhaustible vestibule of what is known and lived as the exhausted, is the beginning and the end of the world.19 Diasporic selves are a state of bricolage wherein unsynchronized temporalities are a given and become a means of carrying onward with sociality across the dramaturgy of volition and subjugation. We, errant bodies, are not starryeyed wanderers but the makers of guerrilla tactics and song lines of survivance.

We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere. As if travelling Is the way of the clouds … We have a country of words. Speak speak so I can put my road on the stone of a stone. We have a country of words. Speak speak so we may know the end of this travel. – Mahmoud Darwish, ‘We Travel Like Other People’

19

Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 199.

‘Come On Home’

Bibliography Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. ‘Errata’. Fundació Antoni Tàpies, October 2019. Exhibition brochure. https://fundaciotapies.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/E NG_Ariella_Azoulay-Errata.pdf. Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso, 2019. Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room. New York: Penguin Classics, 2001. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. ‘On Difference without Separability’. In 32a São Paulo Art Bienal, ‘Incerteza viva’ [Live uncertainty], edited by Jochen Volz, Júlia Rebouças, and Isabella Rjeille, 57–65. São Paulo: Fundaçāo Bienal Sāo Paulo, 2016. Exhibition catalogue. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. ‘Speculations on a Transformative Theory of Justice’, Hearings, 11 April 2017. http://hearings.contour8.be/2017/04/11/speculatio ns-transformative-theory-justice/. Ginwala, Natasha. ‘Introduction: Six Songs, Swirling Gracefully in the Taut Air; Curator Natasha Ginwala on Akinbode Akinbiyi’s Solo Exhibition at the Gropius Bau’. Berliner Festspiele website, February 2020. https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/gropiusbau/programm/2020 /akinbode-akinbiyi/einf%C3%BChrung.html. Glissant, Édouard, and Alexandre Leupin. The Baton Rouge Interviews. Translated by Katie M. Cooper. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse, Selected Essays. Translated by J. Michael Dash. CARAF Books. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Harsanyi, Anna. ‘New Red Order and the Complexity of Process’. International Studio and Curatorial Program website, 23 December 2020. https://iscpnyc.org/journal/new-red-order-and-the-critical-process-at-work. Mendes, Margarida. ‘Molecular Colonialism: Consumption and Growth under Climate Austerity’. Anthropocene Curriculum website, 29 May 2017. https://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/contribution/molecular -colonialism. Moten, Fred. Black and Blur. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Ndikung, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng. The Delusions of Care. Berlin: Archive Books, 2020.

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Sarr, Felwine, and Bénédicte Savoy. ‘The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics’. Paris: Ministère de la Culture, November 2018. http://restitutionreport2018.com/sarr_savoy_en.pdf. Young, Jason. ‘Windward: Toward the Life Cycle of the African Diaspora’. In The Museum of Rhythm, edited by Natasha Ginwala and Daniel Muzyczuk. Berlin: Sternberg; Museum Sztuki, Łódź, 2017.

Museums in Contemporary Educational and Cultural Systems [1971] Stanislas Spero Adotevi

The truth is, at the end of this century, several factors call for the disappearance of museums. Consider museum practices of the past centuries, the needs of underdeveloped countries, and the history of Africa (the Africa of yesterday and especially that of tomorrow). Of course, I can only speak to this group of specialists as an observer. But, I’ve seen museums in Africa, and others before me have written about museums in Europe and Third World countries. I think we’ve fully taken stock of the situation. The museum, the quintessential product of humanist teaching, has nothing to do with the fabric of human life. No doubt, you will criticize me for getting stuck on the details, for ignoring the bigger picture, for confusing the results with the intentions. No doubt. But let’s look closer at the arguments. There are at least three types: 1. If, on a personal level, the museum is an invaluable source of enrichment, on a collective level, in France, for example, weren’t museums created to bring knowledge to the people? 2. We must learn about our country because it forms the only solid foundation of the present on which we are called upon to build. But doesn’t this give an idealized truth to people who are looking for their way in life? 3. Whatever its imperfections, doesn’t the museum put us in direct contact with the reality that could be offered by improvements in presentation, means of organizing events, advertising, and modern propaganda?

We can easily answer these questions. Without speaking for the multitude of people who get bored in museums, we can nonetheless recognize from what’s happening in Africa and from the numerous articles written by eminent spe-

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cialists, that there’s a problem. Furthermore, the titles speak for themselves. Take, for example, this conference, entitled ‘The Museum in the Service of Man Today and Tomorrow’.1 There are also more technical studies such as Duncan Cameron’s ‘Problems in the Language of Museum Interpretation’.2 Other titles, like ‘What Do Museums Have to Offer’,3 get closer to the heart of the matter at hand. In all of these cases, we’re searching in vain, beyond conceptual ingenuity and technical rigor, for ways to hide some people’s uncertainty and other people’s worries. It is often peremptorily declared that the museum, ‘having reached the final stages of its evolution throughout the years, offers immense intellectual, moral, and material resources which make it one of the most tangible realities of the contemporary world.’ Indeed, this was stated at the November 1969 symposium on museums held at the UNESCO Headquarters (another institution). However, it is nearly impossible to forget that the museum is the equivalent of a cemetery where we worship those who have paved the way. At best, the mirror reflects our ancestors wearing themselves out to build the existence of the living. It’s this fantastic place where, amid statuettes, rites, and polyrhythmic dances, people without history come to learn history; human history stretches on. At this altitude, anything can happen. And, indeed, everything does happen. From the Dogon people to coups d’état, there is only one metal, one culture, and it’s education … that’s right. I’m not talking about heritage here; I’m talking about fantasies. I’m saying that since it is necessary to express oneself based on a particular view of Africa, the statuettes, the rites, the dances—all these examples used to characterize our personality—are nowhere to be found in museums and even less so in museums on African soil. We can still find this heritage, the dances, and the statuettes in Africa, but very far from tourist supply centres and camera lenses. The dances, the rites, the masks, everyday life occurs right before the eyes of the public. Men and women experience each individual or collective ges-

1 2

3

Editors’ note: This was the theme of the Ninth General Conference of ICOM (International Conference of Museums), which met in Paris and Grenoble in 1971. Editors’ note: See Duncan F. Cameron, ‘Problems in the Language of Museum Interpretation’, in The Museum in the Service of Man Today and Tomorrow: The Museum’s Educational and Cultural Role; Papers from the Ninth General Conference of ICOM (Paris 1972), 89–99. Editors’ note: As the author read in an article by Hugues de Varine (ex-director of ICOM).

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ture in the flesh and not in a dreamlike or phantasmagorical manner through specialized books by Africanists and in temporary or permanent exhibition halls. To be even more precise, we must take a stance, both here and elsewhere, against everyone who wants to turn the Third World and particularly the African continent into a museum. In other words, we must prevent placing over the fertile soil and subsoil a display case of agile skeletons and deathly boring mannequins. Finally, in general terms, we must recognize that at least since 1968 a new civilization is developing apart from the one that insists on making museums an institution and men a commodity. But what is a museum, and how can a truly humane museological practice lead to a culture that is finally responsible? Until now, the only justification for a museum was the incredibly vague notion that it preserves man’s cultural heritage. Serious scholars spoke about this in their classes and especially in books and novels. And, at the same time, the extraordinary possibilities of industrialization came to the fore. But culture is also, at least since Descartes and notably Kant and Hegel, the faith in reason. Yet industrialization, a product of this reason, can only increase by destroying the very reasons for its own reason. Thus, trapped in contradictions, the grown-up European, a rational and civilized reasoner, a cultivated ‘acculturizer’, had to justify his real (or feigned) taste for the past and his real (or unfeigned) worries about progress. To this end, he came up with this brilliant institution where everyone snores, this institution that Africa rushed to accept, and that ensured its colonial trading economy and all the rest. The museum came out of a pre-industrial age, but the fixations of literary hacks and the inhibitions of snobs have preserved it. It is theoretically and practically tied to a world (the European world), to a class (the cultivated bourgeoisie), and to a particular view of culture (our ancestors the Gauls and their blonde, blue-eyed dolichocephalic cousins). This world is, no doubt, disappearing. The internal rigor of industrial society and the violent blows of recent history are eliminating it. Nevertheless, the museum remains the enchanting focus, the outdated obsession of a class that still believes in expanding its power. Many people still go to museums, but that makes no difference. The fact of the matter is that in the last ten or so years, a new social practice has developed that cares even less about humans than the old humanist

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sham. And this time, the negroes and others are complicit.4 In the service stairs, they are already dreaming of memories and nostalgia! Also, the question is not what the small farmers from Cantal or the young negroes from the sticks will do in the famous guided tours of museums but rather what they will see. What are they trying to find? And what is the relationship between what they want to see or think they see and the actual realm of commentary or educational babble? More precisely, what can a museum tour offer to the society that organizes it? We must, therefore, investigate the theoretical foundation of the museum to understand why today it has imprisoned itself in myth and is consequently threatened by internal erosion. The existence throughout the world of living history museums that are open to progress doesn’t change anything. The appearance of these museums, which have broken with traditional museology, proves that the institution is doomed, and it is doomed precisely because the majority, that is, the new generation, contests it. They are fighting it to such an extent that even museologists are looking to break free of this label. We must understand that this objection is not a mere historical incident, a slightly tricky moment for bourgeois museum thought. It is a full attack on the structure, the essence, the history, and the life of an institution which, for two centuries, has sterilized creation and suppressed cultural evolution. In this regard, the museum is not cut off from education as is generally claimed; it is more accurately the embodiment of a particular view of humanity supported by different existing educational and cultural systems. In its traditional form, the museum openly intends to give a myth to those who don’t have access to culture. This myth instructs them in developing the consciousness they should have. It keeps them paralysed, obedient, submissive, drugged, in short, strangers to themselves, and ripe for ensuring social tranquillity under the protection of great forebears. In its underlying structure, the museum certainly has a complementary and complicit relationship with education. And, if education interpellates individuals as subjects, the museum interpellates them as good citizens. The false consciousness of a real situation, the museum reproduces university lectures on a national level for people of unequal age and rank. And, on an international level, the museum does not just provide technical assistance

4

Editors’ note: The varied capitalization of Negro and related word forms follows the French original and the author’s preference.

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but remains the soul of the refined system of preventative charity called ‘development cooperation’. The field of cultural heritage tries to create abroad, in the name of solidarity, a ‘civilization of the universal’ that it no longer has the strength to build at home. It attempts to create this civilization among peoples who are unprepared for it and excluded from it. This concept is so absurd that it proposes to teach Third World and primarily African populations about their own culture. We cannot blame the intentions of this or that American or European expert because they are undoubtedly sincere. But actually, all this good faith shows that they are entrenched in a structure that, under the banner of solidarity, inevitably prevents ‘assisted’ populations from seeing their problems and real conditions. What actually is an expert? It’s a man who, because of his training, is called upon to give his opinion. But, based on the insightful observations of certain discerning people, we can briefly point out the reasons for the expert’s failure. This failure is often the most disastrous in the cultural domain because it creates and promotes irreversible actions. By contrast, the technical field leads to less disastrous consequences because it allows for re-evaluation, correction, and rectification. A distinguished person having gained much experience in a scientific or professional field, the expert is responsible for giving advice and devising plans and instructions to the advantage of less experienced colleagues. In the case of intergovernmental cooperation, the expert briefly visits a country, studies its problems, draws up a report, and submits it to the concerned government. The expert seldom stays on-site for a relatively long period to oversee the project himself. In the case of museums, the expert rarely completes even ordinary projects. There are several reasons for these failures: the expert is often badly chosen, speaks poorly the language of the country visited, only understands the problems superficially, or after too short of a visit can only consider the culture, the needs, and the working conditions from the outside. The expert’s status as a semi-diplomat prevents him from meeting certain people, hinders certain direct relationships, and puts him at a financial and social level comparable to that of a tourist. Finally, once at home, the expert finishes his daily tasks in his institution, which is no longer in contact with the country where he carried out his mission. Even worse, in his mission report, the expert tends to describe an ideal type of institution, precisely the kind that he would want himself, since his job is to draw from his own experiences to find modern and new solutions.

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As for the visited countries, experience has proven that they are most often dissatisfied with a mission for ignoring their wishes to maintain the existing situation. For the experts’ proposals are often so costly that they would justify a ‘reasonable’ wait-and-see policy. Furthermore, the mission is most often of no interest. Either the country is not ready to change because it lacks financial resources and is short-staffed, or it is so involved in its project that it only calls in an expert to approve decisions that it has already made. In any case, the missions always cost way too much. In certain countries visited, the budget of a mission (travel, living expenses, fees) is three to four times the annual budget of all the museums. And, we can be sure that the expert’s salary is at least five times more than that of local museums’ directors. It is all the more unfortunate that within just two years, four or five experts visited neighbouring countries in the same region with similar problems. And, let us not forget the missions carried out by different or rival organizations to solve the same problem in the same country within a short time. In general terms, these missions often lack organization, funding, and responsibility. They have no touch with reality and are consequently greatly ineffective. Significantly, these missions aim to ensure the superiority of the European cultural model. Thus, through the force of the system and under the pretext of art, the expert ends up defending the cultural supremacy of industrialized countries, which is reinforced by economic, technological, and … ideological power. Internationalizing the concept of human heritage is not only wrong but also dangerous. For it superimposes a whole set of prejudices and knowledge whose principles derive from specific aesthetic, moral, and cultural values. In short, this view supports the ideology of a social class that does not apply to the Third World in general and particularly not to Africa. In fact, what does the view of art in traditional Africa have in common with the European’s view of his artistic productions? Nothing except that people are beginning to acknowledge the existence of art in Africa. But, for the African, there is nothing more natural than artistic activity. Art can die because it participates in human life; it is not the figure of a hypostatized reality but rather the tree bark of life. Art is mortal precisely because it shows, as Hölderlin affirmed for the poet, that man lives on this earth artistically. To be an artist is, therefore, an essential and formidable thing. Ben Enwonwu states:

Museums in Contemporary Educational and Cultural Systems

In the old African social context, art related to all other aspects of life. This African view of art was neither objective nor analytical. The symbolic structures of the artwork expressed the realities of life with the image serving as the link. The conception of art did not derive from art itself but rather from a whole socio-religious ideology of art adopted by the spiritual community.… African art is so integrated into socio-religious concepts that it spontaneously reaches its full potential in recreational activities.5 Therefore, the artist is not an outside observer. He is in the represented image; he is an active creator of society, a producer of history. And art—varied, heterogeneous, and diverse—constantly evolves to adapt to the new social conditions. From the most realistic representations to the most symbolic of symbols: the colonial administrator and his pith helmet! It appears illogical to imitate Europe by placing any original cultural object in museums to be labelled and conserved. There is no difference from displaying a vibrantly glowing firefly as a museum specimen, thereby emptying it of its essence and vitality. We can finally understand why Africans in Africa still laugh hysterically when they are dragged to ‘our museums’. For them, once objects are deprived of their function and banalized in the museum, they become little more than the result of intellectual deviations from their own culture, a foreign consciousness tacked onto a real condition. The Africans laugh about this because only they still instinctively possess a Brechtian power of alienation, a distancing ability which enables them to distinguish drama from melodrama, the problems of stale relics, and the historical events behind borrowed rags. As for the so-called elite, they draw up plans for development and make several dirty deals with imperialism while drinking ‘Black Label’ whiskey in the salons of progressive Christians, social democrats, and all the ex-communists. This elite, all more or less spoiled by the ornaments of negritude, do not prepare for the future but rather settle, with ecstasy and delight, into consumer society and all its alibis, deceit, sublimation, and lies. As long as the negro is in negritude, we are sure that he will not be let loose against the movement of bank funds! Given this consciousness borrowed from the outside, we demand museums to show, as Césaire 5

Editors’ note: These statements by the Nigerian painter Ben Enwonwu were recorded in notes Adotevi took during a conference he attended in Lagos. See also: Ben Enwonwu, ‘The African View of Art and Some Problems Facing the African Artist’ [1966], in Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology, ed. Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 135–43.

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observed, that we too have a culture. Sheltered from the world, taking all the fuss for fate and its exhaustion for thought, we create museums to give rise to all the fantastic forms of modern alienation. We believe we play a significant role, but in truth, our warped consciousness, blind to the actual situation, has minimal contact with reality. Indeed, we only inhabit the outskirts of a history that has succeeded in overrunning and dominating us. As Althusser wrote, ‘it is certainly very disconcerting to see your own works sitting squarely at your right hand for all to see.’6 While Althusser’s observation is applicable everywhere, it is particularly true for Africa. We must become sharply aware of the unique implications of a policy of economic domination, and this should lead us to want something other than these stockrooms filled with lacklustre objects. These objects, wrested from the depths of tradition, are only there to exorcise the crimes of others. For it will not be a coincidence if Europe cannot save its own museums from their impending destruction. The Culture Houses in France only confirm, by emptying them of all substance, by draining them, that museums are good and ready for the bludgeoning that will demolish them. And if British humour, though very rich, still cannot find a replacement term, it’s because this world that gave birth to museums still cannot imagine changing its strategy of narcissistic liquidating. We can find some exceptions in experiments carried out by leading men who completed their training outside of museums and who have a less pathological view of the human being. They executed these experiments in countries that have attempted to redefine culture. Consider the innovative projects of museums in Mexico, the museum in Niamey, and the Anacostia Community Museum, which has addressed the problem of white domination. Furthermore, museums in countries such as India, or in Scandinavia, and more consistently in socialist countries, have shown that a new museum practice must and can only arise from the explosion of museology. We cannot continue to mistake the effects for the causes, appearances for reality. It’s time to get to the root of all of man’s cerebral and moral deviations. We must understand how museum directors, often severed from their own culture by their formal education, live for the most part in physical, intellectual, and moral isolation. They are incapable of knowing what decisions to make in order to change with the world. Finally, far from considering the museum as an allusion, they lose all credibility by attempting to grasp reality with abstract academic concepts. Thinking the moon is made of green cheese, 6

Louis Althusser, For Marx [1965], trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2005), 139.

Museums in Contemporary Educational and Cultural Systems

taking the expressed for the expression, these museum heads, with their maladjusted views of the world, must finally face the cold, harsh reality which will shatter their dreams. Indeed, a museum in itself is nothing. In itself, the museum means nothing. It is only a concept that indicates an action to accomplish, a practical concept signifying that to find the reality to which it alludes, we shouldn’t look for it in the abstract idea of man but rather in real man, in all of man’s social and human relationships. The museum, therefore, isn’t just a shack with abstract reliefs; it’s a signpost, a signal. It’s a signal that, with the help of signs, indicates where man has run out of steam, in which direction he must go, and what actions he must take to arrive at humanity on this earth, all while gazing up at the sky, spangled with infinite stars of destiny. In the end, museum objects have always only represented the tangible, palpable, and material manifestations of human beings’ spiritual and moral existence. They have always expressed man in his environment, his traditions, his life, how he transformed matter, internalized and integrated outside phenomena, and finally how he took on his culture and ensured its development. Through museological objects, we know that culture takes root in a permanent relation between the past and the future and a constant dialogue between tradition and movement. Culture offers possibilities beyond any specific situation of man; it is all of these possibilities. In a word, culture is the development of man, man without limits, only limited by the limitations that he imposes himself by limiting his neighbour. True development, therefore, comes down to taking responsibility for human culture. Also, as members of a society that aspires to develop, that aspires quite simply to a humane life, we must oppose with all conceptual or practical means possible any museological discourse that aims to produce a second-rate civilization. We must prevent the illiterate elite from monopolizing culture and ruining the present. Consequently, all projects to develop museums in Africa or elsewhere in the Third World essentially succeed in maintaining confusion about tradition, transforming the revolutionary power of ideas into psychological plasma, and diverting energies in the distorting mirror of a Western society that is gasping for air. In fact, it’s the same discourse or trajectory that goes from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to Huxley, Bernanos, and the pontiffs of a certain Négritude, arriving finally at the planners of decades of development. This discourse contradictorily decrees that tradition is resistant to development but necessary for humanity to reconcile with itself. Working nations must find a tranquil place of beauty and delight, a relaxing and calm shelter from the pollution of

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civilization. Since development means the creation of leisure time, the Negroes already participate in this civilization through their folklore. By helping them to dance and sing better, by conserving in air conditioning their statuettes for the pleasure of our children and our ethnologists, by making several interior adjustments, by installing a few refrigerators in straw huts, and after two or three decades of development, we will celebrate with them the advent of the UNIVERSAL. Museology in Africa is the crowning achievement of paid vacation. It claims to provide ways of catching up with rich countries, but in reality, it only makes Africans into passive consumers, surveilled clients. The Dogon statuette, far from real life, a shell of itself, no longer has the power today to make us dangerous competitors. It is clear that the museum, a monument to the deceitful discourse of European museology, must disappear. It must be chased away by a museological practice informed by the experiences of millions of men who are still ignored and yet who increasingly recognize the need for alternative models to those inherited from ancient Greece and the Renaissance. Developing consciousness of this situation has explosive potential. This consciousness will lead museology, willingly or not, to reveal its critical role in culture, its true function of knowledge, its adherence to an experimental history. The museum must make way for centres for training and historical refresher courses. These centres will become the heart of inspiration, a source of energy, where culture abounds, the rich wellspring from which all theories of human development will flow. Without place or space, the training centre only exists to fulfil the need for an ideological structure that spreads the human message. It should be in schools, maternity wards, projection rooms, in all the institutions, in all of national life. In other words, we must entirely rethink museology. We must reformulate its principles, presentation, methodology, and training in terms of culture-based development. This training centre is at once a school, a theatre, a public square, and a place for recreation. It uses old museums as a laboratory, reclaiming their storage to demonstrate and reassess previous methods of training. In its principles and its forms, this centre finally breaks with the ‘museums of serenity’ by attempting to bring down to earth everything related to heaven and the invisible. It finally denounces museology for becoming the tool of knowledge.

Museums in Contemporary Educational and Cultural Systems

This viewpoint must adhere to the following principles: 1. Development is not only an economic phenomenon but also a moment in man’s continuous creation of every aspect of himself “from economic growth to the conception of meaning, values, and the purpose of life.”7 2. Growth for the sake of growth is not a proven criterion for development. 3. There is no one standard for civilization, and we cannot define criteria based on the development trajectory of any particular civilization. 4. All criteria are internal to each civilization in a specific relationship between man, the world, and history. 5. Today, millions of men who are still denied the status of men, despite the pitfalls, are clearing the ground for the growth of a new man. Also, at a time of scientific and technological change, we can no longer address issues that affect all men on a global scale only from the perspective of European provincialism. 6. Every form of cultural colonialism, even when tempered with the paternalism of international cultural institutions, is deadly for the Third World and impoverishing and fatal for Europe. 7. Civilizations must have a dialogue, and this dialogue must take a prospective approach rather than a retrospective one. It must aim to develop history in the making. It must lead to developing the underdeveloped by contributing to the development of those who will accept only one criterion for development.

In other words, the museologist’s education must set up a confrontation between cultures by distancing everyone from their own ideals. If we decentre the traditional conception of culture by calling into question European exceptionalism, we can re-evaluate the past and reveal the great moments in the human symphony. Accordingly, all museologists must fulfil the following universal requirements: 1. They must gain an in-depth understanding of cultural and social anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics, and history (particularly ancient and medieval) 2. They must have a solid foundation in the methodologies of multidisciplinary work, mass communication, pedagogy and assessment surveys 7

Editors’ note: Quotation is the author’s own.

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3. They must have significant knowledge of development techniques and their implementation.

As for the more specific training of Third World museologists, we must reduce the frequency of international meetings. For financial, political, and international reasons specific to our regions, these meetings offer almost nothing to our delegates. We must establish ethical rules and international norms, especially to protect tropical goods merchants from raids. These exchanges are not essential, and they should remain only occasional. While we cannot limit the number of grants awarded to study or complete internships abroad, we must consider these trips as a quick fix. First, the criteria for selecting students is questionable. Furthermore, it seems completely absurd to send future African museologists to learn about African ethnology in European museums. For international cooperation to be truly effective, it should strive to use all means possible to achieve: 1. On-site training with the help of the governments concerned. This training should be organized in collaboration with the programmes of regional centres. 2. The creation of large centres in each continent (Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, and North and South America). 3. A permanent system of refresher training or professional development courses for existing staff members, regular national and regional seminars, etc. 4. A continuous dialogue between all the museologists through the usual information channels.

These, of course, are only guidelines. They aim to determine all the tasks necessary to change the institution completely, to integrate, first and foremost, museological practice into the national community, then into the human population. Moreover, it aims to establish ways of adapting activities and presentation and organization methods to the particular conditions of each people to build the human community on parallel subjectivities. It is a question, at all times, of understanding the visible heritage of man through books, photographs, diagrams, and films. This return to reality by listening consistently to objects prevents specialization. In other words, archaeology, the modern art museum, etc. do not have any real meaning. Excavations do not form the basis of archaeology. Archaeology derives from geography, climatology, natu-

Museums in Contemporary Educational and Cultural Systems

ral history, economic history, demography, toponymy, and excavation objects. In other words, archaeology comes after the excavations. It is a moment in experimental history. In this way, specialization is nonsense. There are no ancient or modern objects. Any exhibited object belongs to the past. However, the goal is to show continuity through constant references to the present, the path of evolution through differences, permanence through similarities: the ancient city and the modern city, ancient and current techniques, economic transformations, trade flows, the history of human relations, social and economic relations. In short, a ‘constant dialogue between civilizations’ will convey the key message. And, the permanent show, the convergence of audiovisual media, and the current techniques of ubiquity will create an emotional structure that allows anyone, whatever their level of culture, not only to decipher the message but actually to experience it. It is not a question of juxtaposing artworks but of making it directly perceptible that since the birth of civilizations in the great silty basins of Mesopotamia, the Nile, the Yellow River, and the Indus, there have been constant migrations, conquests, exchanges, encounters, and cross-fertilization. And, even the most insignificant statuette bears witness to this extraordinary human odyssey. Thus, culture and knowledge will meet in a worldly exchange between humans and human-made objects, and museology will decrease the chances of being fooled by words or of being duped by lies. Museology will help patron Europe to be more modest, to understand better the history of humanity by forgetting the narrative that made Western civilization the motor of history and the sole creator of values. Museology will sing of the breadth and the diversity of the world, the future of humanity, its darkest impulses, and its most lucid actions. Finally, today, new scientific and technological change is accelerating development to a dizzying pace and creating through the gap between the two worlds a suspenseful conflict that can only be resolved in the peaceful wake of a disaster. In the process, the following Malian proverb will prove true: ‘If you dig the grave of someone weaker than you, make it big, because you don’t know if he will drag you down with him.’ The new museological practice must prepare for the arrival of a truly responsible culture. It can only do so by grasping things by the root. Now Marx tells us that, for man, the root is man himself. We will see then if museology is to be radical or not.

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Bibliography Althusser, Louis. For Marx [1965]. Translated by Ben Brewster. London: Verso, 2005.   Translated from French by Zoë Stilpass.   First published as: ‘Le Musée dans les sytèmes éducatifs et culturels contemporains’. In Stanislas Spero Adotevi, Négritude et négrologues (Paris: Éditions Delga, 2017), 175–98. With friendly permission by Stanislas Spero Adotevi.

Remembering and Forgetting in the National Museums of South Asia Kavita Singh

Counting Beads In a Museum of Lost Objects podcast, Kanishk Tharoor speaks poetically of a necklace found, miraculously intact, in the ruins of a jeweller’s workshop at the Bronze Age site of Mohenjodaro: The necklace was long. It was strung together on a thick gold wire, with gold beads and semi-precious stones. There was jade, jasper, and agate. In the middle hung seven pendants capped with gold. In these stones you could see swirls of pink, white, blue, and brown. The necklace was the only thing in that jumble of jewels and trinkets that was unbroken over the millennia.1 The same necklace was spoken of much more dryly in an official note written by the director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India: ‘The necklace … consists of 10 jade beads, 55 spacers of gold disk, 7 pendants, and 10 semiprecious stones,’ the director observes. ‘India should be allotted 4 pendants out of 7,’ he goes on to say.2

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Kanishk Tharoor and ‘The Necklace that Divided Two Nations’, in Museum of Lost Objects, BBC Radio 4, first aired 15 July 2017, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p058gg29. ‘Director-General of Archaeology’s Office Note, 9 November 1949’, file no. 33/21/49, Division of Antiquities between Two Dominions (New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India). (Now transferred to National Archives, New Delhi.)

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Fig. 1: Jewellery hoard found at Mohenjodaro. At the centre is the necklace with seven jade and agate pendants and several gold beads that was partitioned between India and Pakistan. Third millennium BCE.

Reprinted from John Marshall, Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilization, vol. 3 (London: Arthur Probsthain, 1931), pl. CXLVIII, A 6.

This note is one of the official records of the process by which a necklace that had remained ‘unbroken over the millennia’ was taken apart bead by bead so that it could be possessed by the National Museums of both India and Pakistan. What circumstances brought things to this pass, where teams of archaeologists, whose professional ethics should have obliged them to preserve the integrity of an ancient object, instead presided over a process of ‘sharing’ objects by physically dismembering them?

Remembering and Forgettingin the National Museums of South Asia

The circa 2400 BCE jade-and-gold necklace was one of the lesser victims of the bloody and brutal Partition of 1947 that accompanied the end of colonial rule in India. When the British let go of their Indian empire in 1947, they left behind not one nation but two, with the Indian subcontinent partitioned into the states of India and Pakistan. The demand for Pakistan—a separate homeland for South Asian Muslims—had arisen in the early decades of the twentieth century. As the anti-colonial movement in British India gathered force and the independence of India had begun to look like an eventuality, political leaders of Indian Muslims had begun to express anxieties about the future of their community. At 21 percent of the total population, the number of Muslims was large, but it seemed destined to be dominated by the much larger Hindu community. Muslim leaders proposed the ‘two-nation theory’, which claimed that the two communities could not coexist. Many models for powersharing and autonomy were put forward, but in the end the most extreme proposal prevailed, and the territory was divided into two sovereign nations: Pakistan, which would offer shelter to the subcontinent’s Muslims, and India, which would have a Hindu majority but be a secular state. In 1947 as a fateful British pen drew new lines on the map of South Asia, it produced a cartographic oddity. The two Muslim-majority regions which formed East and West Pakistan were 2,200 kilometres apart. Between them lay the whole width of the vast territory of India. Suddenly, millions of people found themselves on the ‘wrong’ side of new borders and came under violent attack as regions tried to ethnically ‘cleanse’ themselves. As a desperate people tried to escape, Partition led to one of the largest mass migrations in history. Twelve million people were displaced, of which an estimated two million died through murderous attacks by organized mobs and erstwhile friends and neighbours, through ‘honour killings’ inflicted by their own families, and through exhaustion, hunger, and disease. Tragic as the consequences were for human beings, the new borders also determined the fate of things. Immoveable property such as land, houses, or monuments stayed in place even if their individual owners or communities fled. Moveable objects had more widely varying fates: both new governments could now lay a claim on every publicly owned object that was portable, and each item had to be inventoried, evaluated, and allocated to one nation or the other. This led to a bureaucratic process that was often absurd in its exactitude; while the world was burning around them, officers tried to be even-

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handed as they apportioned locomotive engines and manila envelopes, elephants and ducklings, to one side or the other.3 In this fractious separation, museum collections became subject to partition as well.4 And no museum objects were more bitterly disputed than the archaeological objects and artefacts found in the Indus Valley sites of South Asia’s most ancient civilization. In the 1920s the accidental discovery of a forgotten civilization along the Indus river had deepened the region’s history by more than two thousand years. Suddenly, as vast and well-planned cities dating back to 2000 BCE were uncovered, India’s history became coeval with Mesopotamia and Egypt. In the 1930s and ’40s as the Indian struggle against British colonial domination intensified, the Indus Valley Civilization became a source of nationalistic pride; unlike their colonizers, who only had a shallow history, the colonized people of South Asia could now ‘lay claim to the honour of being the pioneer of civilization along with Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, Egypt, and Assyria.’5 Naturally, at Independence, both India and Pakistan were eager to claim the heritage of the Indus Valley Civilization as their own. It was India’s misfortune that almost all the known sites of the Indus Valley Civilization fell on the Pakistani side of the new border. But it was Pakistan’s misfortune that a cache of 12,000 Indus Valley objects excavated in one of the civilization’s greatest sites, Mohenjodaro in Pakistan, were in the custody of a museum in Delhi, the capital of India. The artefacts had been taken to Delhi for an Imperial Museum that the British had planned to build in the capital of their Indian empire. So here, in India’s possession by a perverse stroke of luck, were 3

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Anwesha Sengupta, ‘Breaking Up: Dividing Assets between India and Pakistan in Times of Partition’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 51, no. 4 (October–December 2014): 529–48. For an excellent account of the impact of Partition on both monuments and portable objects, see Nayanjot Lahiri, ‘Partitioning the Past’, in Marshalling the Past: Ancient India and Its Modern Histories (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012), 137–64; Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2013) is a resonant and poetic book that examines the trace of Partition trauma and national redefinition in South Asia through cultural productions including literature, art, and archaeology. Sudshena Guha, Artefacts of History: Archaeology, Historiography and Indian Pasts (New Delhi: Sage, 2015) offers a sharp examination of the manipulation of ancient history in response to the needs of Partition. A. D. Pusalkar, ‘The Indus Valley Civilization’, in The History and Culture of the Indian People, ed. R. C. Majumdar, vol. 1: The Vedic Age (Mumbai: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1951), 169–200, 169.

Remembering and Forgettingin the National Museums of South Asia

all the prize objects yielded by the Pakistani site of Mohenjodaro: a handful of figurative sculptures; many enigmatic seals bearing elegant carvings and an undeciphered script; and a clutch of impressive ornaments including our jade-and-gold necklace, an extravagant girdle of carnelian and bronze, and headbands of pure gold.6 Both India and Pakistan asserted their legal right over this entire collection. The furious negotiations between the two sides carried on for nearly two years until finally in 1949 both countries agreed to divide the collection in equal parts.7 Objects that were considered ‘duplicates’ of each other, such as minor antiquities and potsherds, were easily apportioned. There was more discussion about the two most significant figurative sculptures: a small steatite bust of a bearded male and a tiny bronze of a naked but bejewelled female. It is not clear whether Pakistan opted for the male figure, and India for the female, or whether the destinations of these two sculptures were decided by chance, for at times during the tense negotiations one of the archaeologists involved confessed ‘we had to toss for odd things.’8 But for the prized articles of jewellery, the archaeologists took to an ‘equal division’ in the most literal sense, counting the beads and spacers in necklaces and girdles with an accountant’s eye. In the director-general’s note cited above, India’s demand for four out of seven pendants in this necklace, for instance, is justified because in another necklace India had received only twelve beads while Pakistan was apportioned thirteen.9 Shall we call this division of necklaces a Solomonic solution that allowed both sides to have a share? Perhaps. But it would be well to recall that in his celebrated judgement, Solomon had asked for the disputed child to be divided between two mothers only to make the disputants conscious of the indivisibility of the prize.

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Lahiri, ‘Partitioning the Past’. Ibid.; Guha, ‘Antiquities for a Nation: The Harappa Gallery of the National Museum of India’, in Archäologie und Rekonstruktion, vol. 55, Transformationen der Antike, ed. Stefanie Klamm and Elisabeth Hoffman (Berlin: DeGruyter, forthcoming); ‘Division of Libraries, Archives and Museums’ in Partition Proceedings: Expert Committee No. 1 (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1949), 121–38. ‘Director-General of Archaeology’s Office Note, 9 November 1949’, file no. 33/21/49, Division of Antiquities between Two Dominions (New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India). Cited in Lahiri, ‘Partitioning the Past’, 158. Lahiri, ‘Partitioning the Past’, 158. Note cited above.

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London to Delhi This partitioned collection of Indus Valley artefacts was given pride of place in the National Museums of both India and Pakistan in their respective national capitals of Delhi and Karachi.10 Neither city had already possessed important museums at the time of Independence; both of these national museums were new institutions that were hurriedly established one after another in 1949 and 1950. Why would two fledgling states, struggling with myriad problems including a flood of refugees who urgently needed to be resettled, be willing to invest their scarce resources in building museums? Although museums and cultural institutions may seem like luxuries that India and Pakistan could ill afford at that time, the urgency with which the two countries established national museums soon after Independence is, in fact, not surprising. As McKim Marriott tells us, ‘No state, not even an infant one, is willing to appear before the world as a bare political frame. Each would be clothed in a cultural garb symbolic of its aims and ideal being.’11 A national museum is an important part of this ‘symbolic garb’. A noble edifice whose halls and galleries rehearse the history of the nation through art, the national museum is designed to lay out the achievements of past civilizations and cultures that had flourished in the territories of the new nation. It makes modern people heirs to a great past and makes the new nation seem like an historical inevitability, a nation-in-waiting that has existed spiritually, if not politically, from time immemorial. It transforms historical figures into cherished ancestors of present-day citizens, and it demonstrates the newly liberated nation’s capacity to collect, care for, and assign value to its heritage independent of the valuations of the erstwhile colonial masters. Many critics have opined that the museum is a colonial imposition upon the many colonized lands in Asia and Africa; the museum never struck root in these new locations, they say, and forever remained an alien institution. But far from being a colonial imposition, the national museum as we now know it is essentially an invention of decolonized nations. That the national museum fulfilled an important and locally felt need is demonstrated by the

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Karachi functioned as the capital of Pakistan until 1959, when the seat of power was shifted to the purpose-built capital city of Islamabad. Mc Kim Marriott, ‘Cultural Policy in the New States’, in Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa, ed. Clifford Geertz (New York: Free Press, 1963), 27–56, 26.

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way in which, in the newly liberated countries across Asia and Africa, the construction of such museums was an act of great symbolic importance.12 To make a national museum of one’s own was to establish equivalence with Spain, France, or Britain, whose grand national museums in Madrid, Paris, and London had held and shared their nations’ patrimony with their citizens for one, two, or three hundred years. But while the desire to have a national museum was inspired by examples of museums in European metropolises, what the museums of new states needed to do was markedly different from what had been done in Europe. The old European ‘national’ museums related a supra- or transnational tale of the history of Western civilization. Claiming as their own heritage the art of ancient Egypt, progressing to ancient Greece and Rome, and then directly to Renaissance Europe, the great European museums developed a ‘universal survey’13 of the history of art, incorporating all that they admired into their own past.14 Among national museums of the new nations, the purpose was different: these museums’ scope was territorially limited, but temporally deep. As shrines to the national culture, they confined their scope to artefacts produced within the territory of the new nation through the ages, by cultures that long predated any modern nation’s arrival on that spot.15 Ge-

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In many instances, a pre-existing colonial museum is made ‘national’ through a change in its emphases and interpretation. See, for instance, Gwendolyn Wright, ‘National Culture under Colonial Auspices’, in The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 127–42, for the case of ‘Indochina’; and Adrienne L. Kaeppler, ‘Paradise Regained: The Role of Pacific Museums in Forging National Identity’, in Museums and the Making of ‘Ourselves’: The Role of Objects in National Identity, ed. Flora E. S. Kaplan (London: Leicester University Press, 1997), 19–44, for the island states of the Pacific. Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach coined the term and pointed out pervasive patterns in art history survey books and museums in their classic essay ‘The Universal Survey Museum’, Art History 3, no. 4 (December 1980): 448–69. These issues are discussed in several essays in Wright, The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology, cited above. See particularly the essays by Andrew McClellan, ‘Nationalism and the Origins of the Museum in France’, 29–40; and Thomas W. Gaehtgens, ‘The Museum Island in Berlin’, 53–78. Simon J. Knell, ‘National Museums and the National Imagination’, in National Museums: New Studies from around the World , ed. Simon J. Knell, Peter Aronsson, Arne Budde Amundsen, et al. (London: Routledge, 2011), 3–28, 11. Describing the role of the Polish National Museum in shoring up a sense of identity, Knell observes: ‘the new state possessed in these works a memory that transcended the awkward realities of history; these objects ensured that the new Polish nation was immediately old.’

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nealogically, this confinement of the national museum’s interest to cultural phenomena within national boundaries derives from the colonial museological apparatus (or actual colonial museum) that it inherits. After all, museums were established in the colonies to document the resources of colonial possessions. By default, what was in the museum was confined to what was in the colony. With the coming of Independence, the limited scope of the museum became its strength, as it turned into a celebration of an exclusively national past.16 In many decolonized nations, the national museum was conveniently made by an act of renaming. A pre-existing colonial museum was made ‘national’ through a change in its name and an alteration of its emphases and interpretation of a pre-existent collection. In the case of the National Museums of India and Pakistan, the seed of their respective national museums was sown not in an already-established colonial museum—as noted above, neither Karachi nor Delhi had a museum suitable for this task—but in a temporary exhibition organized in London under colonial auspices. A scant three months after India’s independence, the Royal Academy in London had mounted an ambitious exhibition titled The Arts of India and Pakistan. Remembered in art history as a significant moment of recognition for South Asian art, the show was the largest such exhibition that has ever been held. It assembled 1,300 objects, ranging from ancient Indus Valley artefacts to paintings by modern artists; from feather-light muslins to ancient stone sculptures weighing several tons; from sculptures in clay, bronze, and stone to miniature paintings, manuscripts, textiles, and decorative art objects. The mounting of such an expansive—and expensive—exhibition in 1947 has been seen as a timely gesture on the part of the British, and a gracious celebration of the independence of India and the creation of Pakistan. That it was housed in the Royal Academy, a prestigious but conservative and Eurocentric institution, has been construed as an ultimate acknowledgement on the part of the imperial masters of the deep level of civilization, and indeed of the nation-worthiness, of its former colonies. The exhibition marked a signal moment when the British art establishment began to treat South Asian artefacts as fine art, speaking of its stone carvings as ‘sculpture’ rather than

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Once the postcolonial states had created this genre it became a category that others desired. Thus, after more than a century of a firmly internationalist scope, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London spent enormous sums of money on developing its British galleries.

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as ‘antiquities’ that were interesting only because they were old, and valuing miniatures as beautifully finished paintings, rather than as vivid sources of documentary information. Despite the best efforts of the exhibition’s curators and scholars to reframe Indian objects as aesthetic masterpieces, the exhibition failed to attract crowds in London and met with only mild approval from the critics. British interest in India was waning. But although the exhibition had only a moderate success in London, its afterlife in India was to have great significance. When the 239 crates bearing the exhibition’s artefacts arrived at an Indian dock, Prime Minister Nehru declared that it would be a pity to disperse the exhibits without first showing the exhibition to the Indian public. The artefacts were summoned to Delhi. But where to show them? The British had recently built their capital at Delhi, though only those buildings essential to governance had been constructed. There was no proper museum in the capital. India’s first minister of education, Maulana Azad, was to organize the exhibition and he set his sights upon Delhi’s grandest building, the former palace of the British Viceroy. Renamed Government House, it was the official residence of the first Indian head of state, but, as the scholarly Azad recalled, ‘Whenever I see the splendid Hall, the thought that comes to my mind is: What a wonderful Library or Museum it would make.’17 Azad had his wish. The governor-general of India agreed to open his home to the public for the cause of art and education. In the winter of 1948, the objects that returned to India were mounted as an Exhibition of Indian Art that welcomed the Indian public into all the state rooms in the lower floor of the grand building, with sculptures displayed in the forecourt and the veranda, and artefacts filing the vestibule, the state drawing rooms, and the grand Durbar Hall, the formal reception hall.18

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Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, ‘Indian Art through the Ages’, in Speeches of Maulana Azad 1947–1955(New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1956), 44–48, 45. Victoria and Albert Museum Registry, SF 47–45/1420, Indian Section General, part file Exhibitions—UK: Undated note (1946) by Leigh Ashton, director of the V&A. Tapati Guha-Thakurta has discussed the London and Delhi iterations of the exhibition in her insightful essay ‘The Demands of Independence: From a National Exhibition to a National Museum’, in Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 175–204.

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The Delhi exhibition was mounted under the direction of a number of Indian experts, including eminent Indologists and archaeologists.19 The accompanying brochure claimed that no less than ‘five thousand years of Indian art’ had been put up in a single show, and that it presented ‘a mirror for … all that India has stood for through the ages.’20 Much like the exhibition in London, the display in Delhi traced a deep history of India primarily through the medium of stone sculpture, for this was the material that had survived in sufficient quantity to tell a nearly continuous story from very early times. Visitors were greeted on the stairs to the building by an enormous sandstone sculpture of a bull that had once topped a third-century pillar bearing an edict by the great emperor Ashoka. This emperor, whose extensive territories nearly matched the contours of modern India, had been championed by nationalist historians of India as a worthy spiritual forebear. At the height of his powers he had chosen the path of pacifism and non-violence; considering Mahatma Gandhi’s recent successful non-violent struggle against the British, the evocation of Ashoka was surely meant to suggest that these noble qualities were endemic to Indians. Inside, the displays of Indus Valley objects were followed by an extensive exposition of ancient stone sculptures from the Mauryan, Shunga, and Kushana periods. These early dynasties had ruled north India from the fourth century BCE to the second century CE, when Buddhism was the dominant faith. The sculptures from this period were mostly figures from the Buddhist pantheon and relief sculptures of Buddhist narratives. Visitors then passed into Durbar Hall, a grand circular hall directly beneath the building’s great central dome. Here were sculptures from the fourth to fifth century CE, from the Gupta Empire, which had been anointed by nationalist historians as the ‘golden age’ of India’s past—when sculptural forms became more sophisticated and Buddhism gave way to Hinduism, making for a historical period more readily recognizable as an ancestor of contemporary India. Sequestered in a narrow passage outside the Durbar Hall were Gandharan sculptures from the Northwest Frontier areas now in Pakistan and

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The eminent scholars involved were V. S. Agrawal, a great Sanskritist and Indologist who was also a curator at several museums; C. Sivaramamurti, an art historian, museologist, and epigraphist; and N. P. Chakravarti, eminent archaeologist and the directorgeneral of the ASI. V. S. Agrawala, Exhibition of Indian Art Held at the Government House, November 6–December 31, 1948, exh.broch. (New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India, 1948), 1.

Remembering and Forgettingin the National Museums of South Asia

Afghanistan. This school of Buddhist art, dating from the first to fifth century BCE, had been patronized by Hellenistic kingdoms that had followed in the wake of Alexander’s foray into the region in the fourth century BCE. Buddhist in content but Hellenized in form, Gandharan art had always been favoured by colonial scholars, since its Greek-influenced style offered a familiar aesthetic they could appreciate. Nationalist Indian scholars predictably rejected this style, seeing it as a regrettable instance of Western influence that diluted the true and essential qualities of Indian art. Sculptures from this school had been highlighted in London, but in Delhi they were relegated to the margins. The rooms that followed held an extensive display of stone and bronze sculptures from Hindu temples of the eighth through twelfth centuries. Miniature paintings from various schools, textiles, and arms and armour rounded off the display, which concluded its sweep of Indian art with exhibits from the eighteenth century, just before the arrival of the British. This marked another major difference between the London and Delhi exhibitions, for the London version had included sections that continued through the colonial period and ended with a display of modern Indian art. In contrast, the exhibition in Delhi drew to an early close, focusing its attention solely on an ancient past uncontaminated by foreign influence. In many ways, this exhibition was a textbook illustration of the case of a newly independent nation asserting sovereignty over its cultural goods, reinterpreting as high culture things that had been disparaged by colonial authorities, and paternalistically sharing these things and values with its people while narrativizing them in ways that suited its new political and ideological purposes. Decades later, when the National Museum moved out of the Viceregal Palace and into its own new building in 1970, it would only develop upon the narrative that had already been anticipated in this first iteration. The far more expansive galleries of the new National Museum would continue to stress the ancient past of the Indus Valley and of early Buddhism, and it would continue to give pride of place to Gupta-period art and the subsequent proliferation of Hindu sculpture. This chronological retracing of Indian history through art would extend from the earliest times only to the twelfth century. In the way it arranged these sculptures, placing them in a sequence that traced the increasing elegance and growing complexity from one phase to the next, the National Museum would foreground stylistic evolution. This narrative had the effect of suggesting that works made in different places and times, in service of different religious sects, were united in the common purpose of achieving the perfect form. As a result, images sponsored by dif-

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ferent communities—Buddhist or Hindu, made for worshippers of Vishnu or Shiva—all became united in this single impulse. By blurring the boundaries between Buddhism’s and Hinduism’s various sects, such an interpretation was of course an enactment in the cultural sphere of the urgent need to unite the country, demonstrating the national motto ‘Unity in Diversity’ in the heritage sphere. Other galleries in the National Museum were arranged according to material—textile, metalwork, jewellery, painting on paper, and so on—and these were relegated to the new building’s upper floors. Whether intended or not, this method of display had the effect of lifting all of these other objects out of history and into a discourse on techniques and skills. And because Islam established itself in India only in the twelfth century, this arrangement succeeding in writing out the Islamic arts from the history of India. In this display, a sultan’s sword became an example of damascening; the sash worn by a Mughal emperor became illustrative of an embroidery technique. The result was (and still is) that one could walk right through the National Museum and be only dimly aware of the fact that for almost a millennium Muslim dynasties from the Ghurids to the Mughals had held sway in much of India and had sponsored the production of an extraordinary array of monuments and works of art. * But this expanded display was to come later. In 1949, the presence of the Exhibition of Indian Art in the former Viceregal Palace gave people of all classes the opportunity to enter a building that they could never have approached in colonial times. By their very act of ascending the stairs and entering its resounding halls, the exhibition’s audience performatively demonstrated the Indian peoples’ newly won democratic rights and their successful displacement of colonial power. Once inside, the art they saw in the rooms and corridors of the great palace was presented to them as their own achievement, for according to the curators, the art of India ‘presents a visual proof of the creative activity, aesthetic achievement and emotional outlook of the Indian people.’21 The exhibition made its most theatrical gesture of decoloniality in the grand Durbar Hall. There, the curtained and swagged platform that had 21

Archaeological Survey of India, Exhibition of Indian Art Held at the Government House, November 6–December 31, 1948, exh. album (New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India), 1.

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formerly supported the thrones of the viceroy and vicereine was now occupied by a larger-than-life-size Buddha sculpture from the Gupta period. Smiling gently, his monk’s robes falling in soft folds across his body, his hand raised in a gesture that told worshippers to have no fear, the Buddha stood as an emblem of the spiritually rich people of India who had successfully ejected the viceroy from his throne.

Fig. 2: Display of National Museum exhibits at the Government House (former Viceregal Palace). A Gupta-period Buddha figure occupies the platform for the viceroy’s throne. Photograph ca. 1959.

Courtesy of National Museum, New Delhi.

Rival Nations, Rival Museums While this exhibition was still on show in Delhi, the government of Pakistan announced that it would soon open a national museum. The Indian education secretary’s reaction was swift: ‘their National Museum is expected to come into being on 15 August 1949. We have a much larger number of exhibits than Govt. of Pakistan and it is a matter of some pride to us that our museum also should open from a date not later than theirs.’22 Spurred on by a sense of ri22

Letter by Dr Tara Chand, 27/7/1949, to Col. Chatterjee regarding setting up National Museum at Govt. House including invitation room; file from National Archives:

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valry, India raced to establish a national museum before Pakistan. What could be simpler than to take the existing exhibition and declare that it was already India’s National Museum? Prime Minister Nehru made just this suggestion, asking that the exhibition in Delhi be retained and used as the nucleus of a national museum. Indian government authorities wrote to the lenders to the exhibition, asking them to donate their collections to the cause of the nascent National Museum of India. ‘Our art treasures are scattered in various collections and are lying in the most neglected condition,’ Minister of Education Azad observed; ‘… we must have a National Museum, supplying a haven for our artistic heritage.’23 Although Azad tried to present the National Museum as the saviour for artworks that were not being valued by their current owners, lenders to the exhibition refused to be co-opted into this ‘national’ project. Private collectors and government museums from India’s provinces all objected to the government’s extortive attempt to lay claim to their art. Files available in the National Archives record the central government’s consternation as it realized that it had no overarching right over these objects and could not arrogate them in the national interest.24 In the end, it turned out that getting things for the National Museum of India out of Pakistan was easier than getting them out of Indian collections. In the years that followed, the government grudgingly returned many of the exhibits, and it was forced into the ignominy of appealing for donations as well as purchasing objects to make a national museum worth its name. For its first eleven years, the National Museum continued to function out of the former palace of the viceroys, its exhibits waning and waxing, sometimes substituting illustrations and photographs for artefacts as it slowly returned objects to their rightful owners and, even more slowly, acquired a collection of its own. Meanwhile, across the border, the National Museum of Pakistan opened in 1949 in Frere Hall, an imposing Victorian Gothic building that had formerly been the Karachi Town Hall.

23 24

F 51–37/50 D III, 1950, National Museum of Art, Archaeology and Anthropology; Selection of site for building Ministry of Education. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, ‘Indian Art and Culture,’ in Azad, Speeches of Maulana Azad, 49–52, 49. File No 4-L/49 M/o (Branch L&A), Proposal to establish a Central National Museum in New Delhi; File No 17 (30-H (P)/53 M/o States (Hyderabad Section); File No. 4(46)-P/49 M/o States (Branch Political).

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Fig. 3: Frere Hall, Karachi. Built in 1869 as the Karachi Town Hall, this was the National Museum of Pakistan’s first home.

Photograph courtesy of OldKarachi.

Making Do in Pakistan If cultural assertions were important for India, they were all the more important for Pakistan. A country created ‘at the stroke of midnight’, whose territory was bifurcated by the whole breadth of an unfriendly India interposed between its two halves, and whose diverse population included a number of different ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups, this nation most urgently needed to find ways to promote a sense of community among its citizens, a sense of wholeness among its fragments, and evidence in the past that would suggest the nation had a natural and organic destiny. Pakistan’s National Museum needed to provide a charter myth for the newborn country by demonstrating its ancient history and manifesting an underlying unity across its fractured geography. As Pakistan was explicitly intended as the sanctuary for South Asia’s Muslims, one would expect its National Museum to make Islamic art the centrepiece of this history and heritage, but in fact, in its early displays the National Museum of Pakistan emphasized ancient pre-Islamic history, and whatever

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Islamic heritage was put on show carefully eschewed Mughal material and favoured more quotidian objects of generally modest origin instead. Why should this be so? The heritage that a country gets is not necessarily the heritage that it wants. If India was disappointed to find that Partition had robbed it of all the important Indus Valley sites, Pakistan had to contend with the irony that the majority of the important Islamic monuments of South Asia fell to India’s share. Thousands of Islamic monuments, large and small, dating from the twelfth to the nineteenth century and associated with various sultanates, the Mughal Empire, or that empire’s successors, were dotted across Indian territory. Whereas Pakistan had one erstwhile Mughal capital (Lahore) with a magnificent fort and mosque, India had three (Delhi, Agra, and Fatehpur Sikri). Even that most fetishized of Mughal monuments, the Taj Mahal, was on the Indian side of the border. Museums and libraries in India had a wealth of Islamic art in the form of miniature paintings, manuscripts, monumental inscriptions, decorative arts, and textiles. How could this rich heritage, so firmly planted in India, be claimed as the heritage of Pakistan? To avoid this conundrum, the National Museum of Pakistan (and other loci of Pakistani official culture) found ways of ‘owning’ just the heritage that it had in its possession. As visitors entered the foyer of the newly established National Museum in Frere Hall, they encountered a national flag and a huge map of East and West Pakistan that marked the principal archaeological sites in the country. Nearby exhibition cases held stone tools that were believed to be more than 400,000 years old. Expectedly, there was also a display of Indus Valley artefacts. On the stairs leading to the upper floor were artefacts taken from ancient Buddhist sites in both wings of Pakistan: stone sculptures from Taxila in West Pakistan (third to second century BCE) and terracotta plaques from Paharpur in East Pakistan (eighth to tenth century CE). Upstairs was the ‘Muslim Relics’ gallery that included a miscellany of objects, again consciously drawn from East and West Pakistan. There were glazed ornamental tiles from houses in West Pakistan, sixteenth- to nineteenth-century epigraphs from monuments and mosques in East Pakistan, manuscripts of the Quran and Persian literature, and a small collection of coins.25 The more imposing exhibits in 25

Abeera Kamran, ‘Report on the National Museum of Pakistan’ (unpublished paper for Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh, 2010; Museology and the Colony, a collaborative project).

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this gallery were decorative architectural elements such as wooden window screens and portions of carved façades, but behind these objects’ journey to the museum lay a sombre reminder of the link between ruination and museumization. These architectural elements had been picked out of ‘the blackened ruins of Lahore, where flame and murder had penetrated into the old city during the Partition riots … [to be now] set up jauntily in the new museum.’26 The small core of historical objects in the museum was supplemented by samples of contemporary crafts from East and West: muslins of Dhaka, richly embroidered cloths of Sindh and Baluchistan, brightly coloured lacquer work of Sindh, and carved wood from Peshawar and Kashmir. Looming anomalously among these artefacts was a large display case with a portrait and some personal belongings of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. The museum’s founder recalls that ‘the formal opening of the National Museum of Pakistan in April 1950 was a successful function.… The GovernorGeneral, flanked by his Cabinet, made an imposing array on the platform, and in the body of the hall an abundance of flowers and the Corps Diplomatique concealed the scarcity of exhibits.’27 This sardonic comment acknowledges that the new national museum had very little to show when it opened. The museum’s significance lay in the fact that it had been established at all, rather than what it was able to exhibit. Much like the National Museum of India, the National Museum of Pakistan had to embark on a long process of acquisitions, making a targeted effort to build a collection capable of carrying the narrative that the mythos of the nation demanded.

Wheeler, on Both Sides of the Border Who was this founder of the National Museum of Pakistan, who could speak of the museum in terms that seem to mix pride and scepticism in equal measure? Who was this man who could regard his own actions with a combination of self-satisfaction (having had the foresight to rescue interesting fragments from the smouldering ruins of riot-hit houses in Lahore) and self-deprecation (aware of the irony of ‘jauntily’ presenting these tragic remainders for aesthetic appreciation in the museum in Karachi)? 26 27

Mortimer Wheeler, Still Digging: Interleaves from an Antiquary’s Notebook (London: Michael Joseph, 1955), 226–27, http://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.17768. Wheeler, Still Digging, 226.

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The man in question was R. E. Mortimer Wheeler, the eminent British archaeologist, excavator of Roman sites in Britain and North Africa, former director of the National Museum of Wales, and founder of the Institute of Archaeology in London. Immediately after Independence, the government of Pakistan had asked Wheeler to be its special archaeological advisor. From 1948 to 1952, while he held this post, Wheeler spent several months of each year in Pakistan, setting up the Pakistani Archaeological Department, conducting excavations and training staff in scientific digging practices. But Wheeler was also a public intellectual who contributed to the popularization of archaeology through a stream of popular publications, radio and TV shows, lectures for general audiences, and archaeology-themed guided tours.28 His success in the public sphere came from his instinctive ability to match historical and archaeological knowledge to present-day political needs. Although Wheeler was only expected to put Pakistani archaeology on a firm footing, he threw his energies into a number of public-facing initiatives, including the rapid writing and publication of a book, Five Thousand Years of Pakistan (1950). The ‘five thousand years’ of the book’s title staked Pakistan’s claim to the long history that India had taken with self-assurance to be its own.29 Yet in constructing its past, Pakistan was faced with a number of difficulties unique to itself. How could one write a history that could overcome Pakistan’s difficult geography? How could one demonstrate a cultural unity between West and East Pakistan while also showing that this culture differed from the history of India which lay between Pakistan’s two wings? And how could one lay claim to ‘five thousand years’ in an Islamic nation when Islam’s own history was less than 1,500 years old? In the opening line of the book Wheeler accepted that ‘the title of this little book is a wilful paradox’30 yet the remainder of Five Thousand Years valiantly made a case for the unlikely unity of East and West Pakistan, their historical distinctness from India, and the continuities between pre-Islamic and Islamic cultures of Pakistan. For its laboured interpretations of climate, race, religion, and aesthetics in service

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Wikipedia, s.v. ‘Mortimer Wheeler’, section ‘Media Fame and Public Archaeology’, last modified 8 July 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mortimer_Wheeler& oldid=966667934. Ever since the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization in the 1920s, historians of India had used this formulation of ‘5,000 years of Indian civilization’. Mortimer Wheeler, Five Thousand Years of Pakistan: An Archaeological Outline (London: C. Johnson, 1950), 11.

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of these agendas, the book was described by Wheeler’s fellow-archaeologist and protégé Stuart Piggott as a work of archaeological ‘propaganda’.31 Still, it provided an influential model for the use of ancient and pre-Islamic material culture in the formulation of Pakistani cultural identity. Unsurprisingly, the other public-facing project that Wheeler took up was the founding of a national museum for Pakistan. It was he who persuaded the government that this was an urgent necessity. As his biographer says, ‘Wheeler was concerned with museums for what they could do to rouse some interest in their past among a shaken, hardly educated public needing a sense of nationhood. In this the authorities gave willing support; Frere Hall in Karachi was assigned as a national museum, a project the Advisor was determined to carry out, despite an insufficiency of both staff and exhibits.’32 Clearly Wheeler understood that for a ‘shaken’ nation emerging from a traumatic birth and facing an uncertain future, the timely gesture of instituting a national museum and declaring its past museum-worthy was far more important than the details of what the museum might say or contain. The great irony was that in the four years immediately before Wheeler came to Pakistan he had been the director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India. He was the last colonial appointee to this post, serving India from 1944 until 1948, and he was brought in to set the decaying Archaeological Survey right by instituting scientific methods of excavation and training a generation of archaeologists. In India, too, Wheeler had expanded his remit beyond these specialist projects to engage with a broader audience and to find present-day relevance for archaeological discoveries. When in the early years of the twentieth century the British government of India had planned its new capital in Delhi, it had intended to build great imperial museums. These plans had been shelved due to the economic strain of the two world wars, but in the late 1940s Wheeler importuned the government of India to set aside funds for a worthy central museum, justifying this even when it was apparent that British rule in India would soon end. As he said, ‘it would be difficult to imagine a more impressive innovation on the part of Free India

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S. Piggott, ‘Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler, 10 September 1890–22 July 1976’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 23 (November 1977): 638, https://doi.org/10.10 98/rsbm.1977.0023. Jacquetta Hawkes, Adventurer in Archaeology: The Biography of Sir Mortimer Wheeler (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), 264.

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in the early stages of development than the establishment of a representative home for its immense and varied achievements in the arts and crafts.… [A] cultural gesture of this kind would, it is submitted, receive an instant and sympathetic response through the world.’33 Preparing for this central museum in Delhi, Wheeler had begun gathering important exhibits from far-flung parts of the subcontinent. It was because of his efforts that the 12,000 disputed artefacts from Mohenjodaro were in Delhi at the moment of Partition, along with a number of important Gandharan sculptures from Taxila.34 Shortly afterwards, Wheeler, as the archaeological advisor to Pakistan, had to plead with his former Indian subordinates for the return of artefacts that he had transferred to India in 1944 as director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India. The whole process was fraught; Wheeler’s biographer notes the prolonged negotiations being dogged by ‘mysterious delays’ on the Indian side and the ‘Sibylline obscurity’ of its replies to his letters. Finally in 1949, when Wheeler ‘was not only exasperated, but becoming anxious lest the important Pakistan collections would not be returned in time to help fill the great open spaces of Frere Hall for the opening of the National Museum,’ the new director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India, N. P. Chakravarti, met with him and negotiations commenced.35 Tellingly, the Indian side was willing to return all the Gandharan artefacts at once, but would not let go of the Indus Valley things, saying, ‘The Indus Valley Civilization as such does not merely represent the civilization of Pakistan but has a direct bearing on the civilization of the whole of India and Pakistan’.36 Wheeler agreed to an equal division of the spoils, though at one point he noted bitterly that ‘As usual, In-

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35 36

Himanshu Prabha Ray, Colonial Archaeology in South Asia: The Legacy of Sir Mortimer Wheeler (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), 127. Ray cites a note by Wheeler, written on 17 March 1947, in file no. 25/4/45. See Ray, Colonial Archaeology, 158, for the letter Wheeler sent to a keeper of the Lahore Museum regarding the gathering of important Indus Valley artefacts for a Central Museum. Ray cites Wheeler, ‘Antiquities from the Indus Valley—Exhibition and Storage at the Central Museum, Lahore’, DO no 348/c, 7 May 1944 to Mohd. Ismail Chaudhuri, Lahore, ASI file no 25/17/44. Wheeler listed 18,000 objects from Mohenjodaro, 2,000 from Chanhudaro, and 1,000 more from Jhukar and a few other Indus Valley sites that were to be shifted from their original museums. Hawkes, Adventurer in Archaeology, 266–67. This statement is attributed to Chakravarti by Lahiri, ‘Partitioning the Past’, 153–55.

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dia won the toss on the two occasions when we had to toss for odd things. You seem to have won down the line.’37

Remembering the Buddha in Karachi We have seen that the scanty exhibition that opened the National Museum of Pakistan in Karachi in 1950 comprised only three thematic displays, two of which devoted to Pakistan’s pre-Islamic art. As with the National Museum of India, this early and provisional display would be elaborated in the mature National Museum, which would shift into its own purpose-built building in 1970. There, the ‘Muslim Relics’ gallery would blossom into a larger circuit of galleries for ‘Muslim Art’, with a special hall devoted to a collection of Qurans that would be built up over the years. But the museum’s narrative would continue to suture Islamic art to a tapestry that included the Indus Valley Civilization and ancient Buddhist art. It was not so difficult to understand the pride taken in the Indus Valley’s achievements which showed Pakistan possessing an ‘advanced’ civilization in very ancient times. But the museum’s continued valorization of the Buddhist past is an aspect that has until recently remained under-theorized.38 Media images have built for us an image of iconoclastic Muslims implacably opposed to the ‘idols’ of Buddhism that are the ancient heritage of the lands they inhabit. To this clichéd view, a recent article by Andrew Amstutz offers a welcome corrective.39 Following on a cue from Ananya Jahanara Kabir,40 Amstutz’s fascinating article shows how Pakistan’s relationship with its Buddhist past has been neither unchanging nor oppositional. In fact, during the early decades after Independence, Pakistan’s Buddhist heritage was central to two crucial agendas: the unity of West and East Pakistan, and the regions’ common difference from India. Although ancient Buddhist art had been excavated, studied, and extolled by archaeologists of the colonial period, Amstutz shows how the Pakistani

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40

Lahiri, ‘Partitioning the Past’, 158. Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias, 92. Andrew Amstutz, ‘A Pakistani Homeland for Buddhism: Displaying a National History for Pakistan beyond Islam, 1950–1969’ South Asia: Journal for South Asian Studies 42, no. 2 (March 2019): 237–55, https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2019.1580814. Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias.

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embrace of Buddhist art was not a mimicry of colonial predilections but was an answer to Pakistan’s own and present needs. ‘Pakistan’s museum curators and historians repurposed colonial museums for Pakistani nationalism in unanticipated ways,’ Amstutz says.41 Firstly, the fact that both West and East Pakistan had a rich Buddhist heritage proved that their histories were linked even in the distant pre-Islamic past. In the 1960s historian and politician Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi took this idea further, declaring that the adherence to Buddhism in these regions showed that the local populations had rejected Hinduism; these pre-Islamic proto-Pakistanis were already resisting Hindu hegemony.42 Buddhism appears as a proto-Islam: unlike the idolatrous, ritual-bound Hindu faith, Buddhism was a rational faith and the Buddha was a prophet and an exemplary human being, but not a god. Of the different schools and periods of Buddhist art, the art of Gandhara was valued most highly. The very reasons for which Indian scholars had disparaged Gandharan sculpture made it valuable to Pakistan. While Indian nationalist critics and historians rejected Gandharan art for its ‘foreign influence’ which made it extraneous to the Indian mainstream, for Pakistani archaeologists and museum keepers this only proved that ‘the arts of India and Gandhara advanced along separate paths’, marking Pakistan’s primordial separation from India.43 The hybrid Hellenistic-Buddhist style of the sculptures embodied an ancient cosmopolitanism which contrasted with India’s self-absorption. And finally, the manifest connection of Gandhara with Greek, Roman, and Central Asian lands shifted Pakistan’s cultural centre of gravity westward. It was as though the region had turned its back on India since ancient times. Amstutz notes that the curators of the National Museum of Pakistan spent the decade after the museum’s founding assiduously building up its Buddhist art collection at the same time it was augmenting its collection of Islamic art. The gallery of Buddhist art was expanded to celebrate the 2500th birth anniversary of the Buddha in 1956, and international exhibitions of Buddhist art formed an important part of Pakistani diplomacy through the 1960s. Clearly, Buddhism continued to be an important focus in the following decade, although interpretive frameworks did shift; by the 1960s the museum’s cata-

41 42 43

Amstutz, ‘A Pakistani Homeland for Buddhism’, 238. Amstutz, 247. Amstutz, 244, citing M. A. Shakur, A Guide to the Peshawar Museum, Part 1 (Peshawar: Gov. Printing and Stationery, North-West Frontier Province, 1954), 11.

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logue de-emphasized the cosmopolitanism and highlighted the deep religiosity of the Gandharan people, suggesting that the Pakistani people had always been devout.44 One of the utilities of the Buddhist past lay in the fact it underlined affinities between West and East Pakistan. Yet the National Museum’s displays valorized Gandharan Buddhist art while only paying lip-service to the Buddhist art from East Pakistan. The museum did have sculptures from sites in the East, including the great Buddhist monastery of Paharpur, which flourished in the eighth through twelfth centuries CE, and the coeval Buddhist complex of Mainamati, first discovered in 1955. These were two of the major religious centres of the Pala Empire, which had stretched across parts of what is now Bangladesh and eastern India. Made of brick, these complexes were decorated with fine reliefs in terracotta, a natural choice in an alluvial plain that had no nearby quarries for stone. The ancient and sophisticated sculptures, however, were patronizingly called ‘excellent specimens of folk art’ by Pakistani archaeologists, linking the historic clay sculptures to the common toys and vessels made by village potters of the day.45 In other writings too, East Pakistan was spoken of as a rural idyll, a place of lush vegetation and thriving fauna, where the overgrown jungles had taken over the landscape and left little trace of historical landmarks, making it impossible to trace a continuous history of the place. Buddhism had lapsed here as well, losing its simplicity, becoming ritualized, and degenerating into forms of ‘worship common both to Buddhists and to Hindus’.46 Producing artworks that were only one step up from common folk art, unable to preserve Buddhism in its pure and non-idolatrous form, sinking into the torpor of the tropics: in this formulation, East Pakistan was markedly the lesser half in the Pakistani whole. From the very start, it seems the threads that bound East and West Pakistan were fraying; in a few short decades, they would snap.

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Amstutz, ‘A Pakistani Homeland for Buddhism’, 254. Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias, 95, citing Muhammad Husain, East Pakistan: A Cultural Survey (Karachi: Pakistan PEN, 1955), 148. Kabir’s chapter ‘Terracotta Memories’ is a brilliant exploration of the meanings of clay in the shared and divided history of South Asia. F. A. Khan, Architecture and Art Treasures in Pakistan: Prehistoric, Protohistoric, Buddhist, and Hindu Periods (Karachi: Elite Publishers, 1969), 166.

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An Islamic Heritage for Pakistan In the introduction to Five Thousand Years of Pakistan, Mortimer Wheeler wrote: ‘Where every condition of geography, physiography, climate, and race combines to stress the separateness of West and East Pakistan, one transcendental character unites them: a common ideology, a common way of life. A Muslim Punjabi can enter the house of a Muslim Bengali and immediately feel at home.’47 Wheeler, never at a loss for words that would please his patrons, elegantly articulated the factor that united Pakistan despite all its manifest disunities. As a refuge for South Asian Muslims, Islam was to bind all of Pakistan’s citizens to each other. It is natural to expect, therefore, that the arts and archaeological finds connected to the presence of Islam in South Asia would be the prime category of objects for the National Museum of Pakistan, just as stone sculpture that traced the deep history of iconophilic religious cultures was the privileged genre of object for India. By 1964 the ‘Muslim Relics’ gallery at the National Museum in Frere Hall was reorganized and expanded. A large case was prepared for a diorama of a desert landscape featuring soldiers, a medieval catapult, and a fort. This scene depicted the siege of Debal in 711 CE. Chronicles record that a local Hindu king who had control of Debal—a port city in Sindh—had unjustly captured an Arab trading boat, and the Umayyad governor of Iraq sanctioned a military campaign in revenge. The successful campaign was led by the governor’s seventeen-year-old nephew, Muhammad bin Qasim. This diorama, the wall label tells us, celebrates an important event: ‘The conquest of Debal inaugurated an era of Muslim rule in the subcontinent, which lasted for about a thousand years and of which, the creation of Pakistan is a sequel.’48 As the years have gone by, historians, archaeologists, and ideologues have burnished the memory of Muhammad bin Qasim and the significance his conquest; he has been hailed as ‘The First Citizen of Pakistan’ and the anniversary of his conquest of

47 48

Wheeler, Five Thousand Years of Pakistan, 14. S. A. Naqvi, National Museum of Pakistan (Karachi: Dept. of Archaeology, Ministry of Education, Government of Pakistan, 1970), 23–24. Muhammad bin Qasim’s victory at Debal is commonly seen as the first act in a sequence that would lead to the establishment of Pakistan.

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Debal has begun to be celebrated as the Yaum-i-Bab-ul-Islam, the anniversary of the arrival of Islam.49

Fig. 4: Diorama of the conquest of Debal by Muhammad bin Qasim. Photograph by Abeera Kamran.

© Kavita Singh.

That the National Museum needed to celebrate the siege of Debal through a clay-and-plaster diorama underlines the continuing thinness of its collections, which leaned on reproductions and representations to trace the history it considered important. But by 1970, when the museum moved into its new building, it had expanded its holdings significantly and could have a Muslim Gallery in which the authorities set out to display ‘the manifold aspects of Islamic art and the Muslim contribution to many spheres of secular progress.’50 By then, the museum had amassed over ten thousand manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and regional languages of Pakistan, as well as many objects of Islamic art.51 The museum guidebook speaks of the large number 49

50 51

Ismail Kazi, The Chachnamah: An Ancient History of Sind; Giving the Ancient Period Down to the Arab Conquest [1900], trans. Mirza Kalichbeg Fredunbeg (Dhaka: BlankPage; Create Space, 2012). Also see Manan Ahmed, ‘The Advent of Islam in South Asia’, in A History of Pakistan, ed. Roger D. Long (Lahore: Oxford University Press, 2015), 135–65; and the ‘Archaeogeography’ chapter in Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias. Naqvi, National Museum of Pakistan, 23. Hidayat Ullah Siddiqui, Quran Manuscripts: A Catalogue (Karachi: National Museum of Pakistan, 1982), 1.

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of Umayyad coins and pottery on display; the glass objects from Syria and luxury ceramics from Baghdad from the tenth to fourteenth century that it put on show; and how it even had specimens of tenth-century silks from the Buyid dynasty that had flourished in Iran and Central Asia.52 Beside these, the gallery showed metalware from the subcontinent and Central Asia and scientific instruments such as astrolabes and celestial spheres from Persia and the Maghreb. Yet, curiously, among all these Buyid silks and Iraqi lusterware and Persian astrolabes, there were no Mughal artefacts to be seen—no ivories, no floorspreads, no jewelled daggers, no gorgeously illustrated manuscripts, and no lavish Mughal albums, even though the Mughals were by far the most important Muslim dynasty of South Asia who had long had their capital at Lahore, the second city of Pakistan. The objects that were given pride of place in the Muslim Gallery were not objects of local manufacture, nor were they from the sixteenth to eighteenth century, when fine Mughal culture was at its height and had flourished in regions that fell within both East and West Pakistan. Instead, these were artefacts crafted in West Asia, between the ninth to fourteenth century, which was Islam’s ‘golden age’.53 What little Mughal material was displayed in association with the Muslim Gallery was limited to arms and armour placed in showcases in the veranda rather than within the gallery. Could one argue that Mughal art was omitted from the gallery because the museum simply did not have artefacts worthy of being shown? Perhaps the best Mughal material in Pakistani collections was held in Lahore, which had been the Mughal capital. Yet the Gandhara Gallery did not hesitate to acquire objects on extended loan from other museums, or to include important artworks in reproduction; the display of casts and copies was acceptable within the museum’s curatorial philosophy. The museum could similarly have expanded its holdings of Mughal art through reproductions or loans. The exclusion of Mughal materials here must be a conscious choice for a gallery that wanted to trace Pakistan’s ‘Muslim art’ through objects associated with the locus and tempus classicus of Islamic art—the West Asia of Islam’s ‘golden age’—rather than the more syncretic and local productions of the subcontinent’s most eminent Islamic dynasty. It remains for us to understand how the exhibits of Syrian glassware and Damascene coins were connected to Pakistan. And there was a connection—a 52 53

Naqvi, National Museum of Pakistan. Naqvi, National Museum of Pakistan, 28.

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deeply buried one. These were all objects that had been found in excavations in Sindh, at sites that had been settled by Arab military adventurers who had made incursions into the western reaches of Pakistan in the eighth and ninth centuries. After Muhammad bin Qasim’s conquest in 711 CE, Arab governors had established settlements in Sindh, in which they built houses, palaces, and mosques that were stocked with luxury goods imported from West Asia. The artefacts in the Muslim Gallery had been found at Banbhore and al-Mansurah, two settlements associated with bin Qasim and his nephew. They marked the arrival of political Islam in South Asia, as yet a fresh and pure import, untainted by any miscegenation with local cultures. On the inauguration of the National Museum’s new building on 21 February 1970, Pakistan’s director of archaeology looked back on the museum’s ‘extremely modest beginnings in 1951’ and hailed its growth into ‘a major repository of national treasures, a centre of research and … a dynamic institution of visual education.’54 But by the time the building was ready, the national capital had migrated elsewhere. The city of Islamabad had been built, and the central government had moved its offices there. The edifices around the National Museum, which for a time were the centre of the national government, had shrunk back to being provincial: the museum’s neighbour was no longer the building that housed the National Assembly, but accommodated the Assembly for the province of Sindh; the nearby Secretariat was now the Sindh Secretariat; and the Supreme Court adjacent to the Museum had become only the Karachi Branch Registry, as the Supreme Court’s headquarters, too, had moved to Islamabad. It is curious, then, to consider why the National Museum would remain in the erstwhile capital of the country. Was it because the government feared that taking such an important institution away from Karachi would cause umbrage among its citizens? Was it because the museum would serve a larger population in Karachi than in the newly settled Islamabad? Was it that the museum was too insignificant to the overall plan for the new capital to relocate it? Or was it that the museum in its new and expanded form had already become out of date, opening at a point when the entire cultural project of Pakistan needed to be rethought as the cracks between East and West Pakistan were broadening into an irreversible rupture?

54

F. A. Khan, ‘Acknowledgement’, in Naqvi, National Museum of Pakistan, i–ii, i.

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Naturalizing Culture in the East We turn finally to the land that was the eastern wing of Pakistan from 1947 to 1971 but then became the sovereign state of Bangladesh. Everything about the cultural identity of Bangladesh promises to be more complex than India or Pakistan, for this is a place that has undergone partitions and political redefinitions at least thrice: in 1905 when the colonial government partitioned Bengal into an East and a West province supposedly for administrative convenience; in 1947 when it became East Pakistan; and then in 1971 when, at the end of a bloody liberation struggle, it emerged as an independent state. At each turn, it needed to redefine itself. When the region was East Pakistan it could be expected to be strongly united with West Pakistan through the common bond of Islam. But the Punjabi-dominated West, fearing that the more populous but poorer East would overwhelm it through electoral means, brazenly discriminated against East Pakistan. Thus alienated, East Pakistan found that what it held in common with West Pakistan became less important than the ways it differed from it. Bangladesh’s liberation struggle was fuelled by the sense of cultural difference; the Bengali language, ethnicity, and local culture were now seen as fundamental to its identity, and religion alone was not enough to override these differences. It is not possible here to elaborate upon the brutal and tragic history of the birth of Bangladesh, but every kind of war crime was perpetrated here as West Pakistan tried to hold on to its dominance over the East. Against this turbulent history, with repeated partitions and national redefinitions, how would the museum in Dhaka, East Bengal’s largest city, define and redefine itself? The museum in Dhaka started out in 1914 as a small university museum whose curator, Nalini Kanta Bhattasali, served it for thirty-three years, until his death. Although the museum had very poor resources and almost no funds, Bhattasali made up for this with his enthusiasm. When he joined the museum it had six sculptures in its collection; his extraordinary efforts led to the acquisition of hundreds of important Buddhist and Hindu sculptures from the Pala and Sena dynasties (eighth through twelfth centuries) whose links with South East Asia carried the Indian style to Thailand, Indonesia, and beyond. Nalini Kanta Bhattasali passed away in 1947, a few months before Partition, when Dhaka became the provincial capital of East Pakistan. Under new directors, and in answer to new needs, the museum changed its orientation.

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Its new keeper removed the Hindu sculptures that had been arranged outside along the building’s façade, moving some to less prominent positions in the museum and placing the majority of sculptures in storage.55 He arranged one room for Buddhist relics, another for a picture gallery, and a third for arms and armour. A fourth room was declared a Gallery of Muslim Art, ‘for which there was high demand’, but at the museum’s inauguration the gallery was left empty. Instead, the museum keeper used the opportunity to put an appeal to the public to donate objects to stock its newly established but empty venue for Muslim art.56 At that point, the Dhaka Museum was simply the museum of the principal city of East Pakistan. But after 1971, Bangladesh needed a national museum. The drive and energy of the ambitious archaeologist then heading the Dhaka Museum, Enamul Haque, transformed the small museum into a major institution. Covering an area of 200,000 square feet, at the time of its 1983 inauguration the Bangladesh National Museum was the largest museum building in Asia. But what would it show? Islam had been the glue that was supposed to bind East and West Pakistan together, and this glue had failed. It could no longer be the centrepiece for the Bangladesh National Museum. Nor could beautiful Buddhist and Brahmanical sculptures carry the weight of a new national identity. Accordingly, in the forty-three galleries that are currently open in the Bangladesh National Museum, only one gallery shows Islamic objects and two galleries show the Buddhist and Brahmanical sculptures. What is in the rest? Today, visitors to the museum first enter a gallery that has a large relief map of Bangladesh on the floor (just as the National Museum of Pakistan features a similar map of Pakistan). There are place names on the base, and when visitors press buttons next to these names, bulbs light up on the map to show the locations of the selected places. This map gallery is followed by a series of galleries on local flora and fauna, the tribal people of Bangladesh, and displays of Bangladeshi boats, which include models as well as full-size riverboats. As Bangladesh is a riverine country, boats, navigation, and fishing are of course important to the economy and local technology of Bangladesh.

55

56

This keeper was A. H. Dani, who was to have an illustrious career as Pakistan’s foremost archaeologist and scholar of ancient history. It has not been possible here to discuss this fascinating figure, who started his career in India and served both East and West Pakistan at length. Dacca Museum, ‘Annual Reports of the Dacca Museum for 1947–52’, 6.

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Fig. 5: Map Gallery, Bangladesh National Museum. Photograph, ca. 2007, by Rituparna Basu.

© Kavita Singh.

On the upper floor a circuit of galleries displays objects from folk culture—embroideries, dolls, and musical instruments—before going on to a series of galleries on modern and contemporary art. These lead to galleries dedicated to the Bangladesh liberation movement. Since the issue of linguistic identity was central to the Bangladeshi struggle for self-determination, there is a gallery devoted to the Bhasha Andolan, or the Language Movement. Here, the poetry and portraits of writers from East and West Bengal (in India), such as the iconic Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore, are displayed.57 The standard understanding of the function of national museums is that they should assert the long-standing presence of high culture in their region, as something upon which the eternal essence of the people might be 57

I am grateful to Basu, ‘Bangladesh National Museum: A Report’ (unpublished paper for Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh, 2009; Museology and the Colony, a collaborative project) for this description of the displays.

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posited. The National Museums of India and Pakistan certainly enact this script through art. But for Bangladesh to have had an art museum as its national museum would not have been of much use because its high art was aligned with Buddhism or Hinduism or Islam, all useless for its national project. Instead, the Bangladesh National Museum coalesces the natural history museum, the ethnological museum, and the art museum into one. It defines Bangladesh in terms of its folk—their language and lifeways, folk arts, vernacular technologies, and domestic rites. This national formation, as well as the identity that it needs to sustain, finds its best expression not in the high civilizational art but in the quotidian practices of the folk. One could even read the museum as saying that Bangladesh chooses to show itself as a natural entity rather than a cultural one, embracing the terms on which West Pakistan had once belittled it.

Conclusion The three national museums discussed in this paper belong to three neighbouring countries of South Asia: India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. While the region is united through millennia of shared history, the three countries became independent of each other through bitter struggles. At the moment of their violent creation each nation was born with a different ideology, a different ‘ideal’ self, a different self-narration. In this complicated landscape, much that was inherited by each nation could be a source of national pride, but much that was inherited did not serve the narrative that each nation needed to tell itself about itself. As sites that provide ‘the scenography and stage for the performance of myths of nationhood’,58 the national museums of the three countries had to pick their way through what was often a shared history and a shared vocabulary of art to underline their differences from each other. Using what was often a common corpus of objects, each museum had to make sense of it in different ways in order to create shared memories for their citizens and often, more crucially, creating and fostering a series of shared amnesias.

58

Knell, ‘National Museums and the National Imagination’, 4.

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Bibliography Agrawala, V. S. Exhibition of Indian Art Held at the Government House, November 6–December 31, 1948. New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India, 1948. Exhibition brochure. Amstutz, Andrew. ‘A Pakistani Homeland for Buddhism: Displaying a National History for Pakistan beyond Islam, 1950–1969’. South Asia: Journal for South Asian Studies 42, no. 2 (March 2019): 237–55. https://doi.org/10.10 80/00856401.2019.1580814. Archaeological Survey of India. Exhibition of Indian Art Held at the Government House, November 6–December 31, 1948. New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India, 1948. Exhibition album. Ahmed, Manan. ‘The Advent of Islam in South Asia’. In A History of Pakistan, edited by Roger D. Long, 135–65. Lahore: Oxford University Press, 2015. Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam. Speeches of Maulana Azad, 1947–1955. New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1956. Basu, Rituparna. ‘Bangladesh National Museum: A Report’. Unpublished paper for Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh, 2009. Museology and the Colony, a collaborative project. Dacca Museum. ‘Annual Reports of the Dacca Museum for 1947–52’. Annual Reports of the Dacca Museum. Division of Antiquities between Two Dominions. File no. 33/21/49. New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India. (Now transferred to National Archives, New Delhi.) ‘Division of Libraries, Archives and Museums’. In Partition Proceedings: Expert Committee No. 1, 121–38. New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1949. Duncan, Carol, and Alan Wallach. ‘The Universal Survey Museum’. Art History 3, no. 4 (December 1980): 448–69. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8365.1980. tb00089.x. Guha, Sudeshna. ‘Antiquities for a Nation: The Harappa Gallery of the National Museum of India’. In Transformation der Antike, edited by Stefanie Klamm and Elisabeth Hoffman. Vol. 55 of Archäologie und Rekonstruktion. Berlin: DeGruyter, forthcoming. Guha, Sudeshna. Artefacts of History: Archaeology, Historiography and Indian Pasts. New Delhi: Sage, 2015. Guha-Thakurta, Tapati. ‘The Demands of Independence: From a National Exhibition to a National Museum’. In Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions

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of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India, 175–204. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Hawkes, Jacquetta. Adventurer in Archaeology: The Biography of Sir Mortimer Wheeler. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982. Husain, Muhammad. East Pakistan: A Cultural Survey. Karachi: P.E.N. Centre, 1955. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia. New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2013. Kamran, Abeera. ‘Report on the National Museum of Pakistan’. Unpublished paper for Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh, 2010. Museology and the Colony, a collaborative project. Kaplan, Flora E. S., ed. Museums and the Making of ‘Ourselves’: The Role of Objects in National Identity. London: Leicester University Press, 1997. Kazi, Ismail. The Chachnamah: An Ancient History of Sind; Giving the Ancient Period Down to the Arab Conquest [1900]. Translated by Mirza Kalichbeg Fredunbeg. Dhaka: BlankPage; CreateSpace, 2012. Khan, F. A. ‘Acknowledgement’. In S. A. Naqvi, National Museum of Pakistan, i–ii. Karachi: Dept. of Archaeology, Ministry of Education, Government of Pakistan, 1970. Khan, F. A. Architecture and Art Treasures in Pakistan: Prehistoric, Protohistoric, Buddhist, and Hindu Periods. Karachi: Elite Publishers, 1969. Knell, Simon J. ‘National Museums and the National Imagination’. In National Museums: New Studies from around the World, edited by Simon Knell, Peter Aronsson, Arne Budde Amundsen, et al., 3–28. London: Routledge, 2011. Lahiri, Nayanjot. ‘Partitioning the Past’. In Marshalling the Past: Ancient India and Its Modern Histories, 137–64. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012. Marriott, McKim. ‘Cultural Policy in the New States’. In Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa, edited by Clifford Geertz, 27–56. New York: Free Press, 1963. Naqvi, S. A. National Museum of Pakistan. Karachi: Dept. of Archaeology, Ministry of Education, Government of Pakistan, 1970. Piggott, S. ‘Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler, 10 September 1890–22 July 1976’. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 23 (November 1977): 623–42. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.1977.0023. Ray, Himanshu Prabha. Colonial Archaeology in South Asia: The Legacy of Sir Mortimer Wheeler. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008. Shakur, M. A. A Guide to the Peshawar Museum, Part 1. Peshawar: Gov. Printing and Stationery, North-West Frontier Province, 1954.

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Siddiqui, Hidayat Ullah. Quran Manuscripts: A Catalogue. Karachi: National Museum of Pakistan, 1982. Wheeler, Mortimer. Five Thousand Years of Pakistan: An Archaeological Outline. London: C. Johnson, 1950. Wheeler, Mortimer. Still Digging: Interleaves from an Antiquary’s Notebook. London: Michael Joseph, 1955. http://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.17768. Wright, Gwendolyn. The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1996.

Repatriating Cultural Identity The Egyptian Discontinuity Pretext Monica Hanna

The reason I became interested in Egyptology was my summer and winter vacations returning to my family’s home town of Matai, in Minya. During my childhood, my mother usually sent me down south to my grandmother’s house, built right on the Ibrahimiya canal. My access to the social life there was through the amazing lady who helped my grandmother in the house, the late Neama, or, using her ‘real’ name, Road el-Farag Mohamed Khamis. She told me all the great stories I remember from my childhood, sang me all the lullabies, and taught me about traditions, folk medicine, and folk magic. When I joined the American University in Cairo, I always heard Neama’s stories resonate in the great comments Professor Fayza Haikal made in her Egyptology classes.1 Haikal has always tried to connect the past with the present through the magnificent philology of ancient Egypt. She even encouraged me to write my senior project paper for her religion class on a comparative reading between the Book of Revelation and the Book of the Dead. I think this has shaped how I have continued to view ancient Egypt as part of a living heritage, rejecting how colonialist Egyptology tries to portray ancient and modern Egypt as two entities hermetically sealed off from each other. The rationale for writing this essay is to respond to a comment by Professor Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. In the 2018 film Nefertiti: The Lonely Queen,2 Parzinger states—in order to justify why the Neues Museum in Berlin needs to keep the bust of Nefertiti in its collection—that modern Egypt now has no relationship to its ancient past.

1 2

Fayza Haikal, ‘Egypt’s Past Regenerated by Its Own People’, in Consuming Ancient Egypt, ed. Sally MacDonald and Michael Rice (New York: Routledge, 2016), 123–38. Nefertiti: The Lonely Queen (Stories from the World of Looted Ancient Art), directed by Thorkell Hardarson and Örn Marinó Arnarson (2018, Markell Productions).

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This view is shared by many other academics and cultural property lawyers.3 I have always been interested in the decolonization discourse in Egyptology, the field I hold a BA in and one which is, unfortunately, colonialist, but this is part of the realities of our time. For this reason, my own research has focused on addressing such inequalities of power in the field of Egyptian Heritage, as I prefer to name it. These inequalities have also kept the social history of Egyptian tangible heritage poorly documented and under-researched by conventional academic Egyptology, where it is looked down upon as mere storytelling, rather than proper ethnoarchaeological data that helps to fill in the gaps of knowledge that we have today in the ancient historical record of Egypt. Part of this dynamic has also been the lack of Egyptologists over the past two centuries who have mastered enough of the Arabic language to do such work, as well as their general lack of solid interest in modern Egyptian society, which many Egyptologists still today would rather have nothing to do with, and consider merely as the source of the workmen on their excavations, or as hindrance to their work of discovering more gold and tombs. This comment by Professor Parzinger was quite harsh to my ears and it made me want to bring to light as much as possible in response to it. With the advent of St Mark spreading Christianity to Egypt in the first century CE, most of the rituals that were part of worshipping the gods of ancient Egypt were transferred to the Christian faith. The most common shift was the adoption of the veneration of the Virgin Mary, who took on a similar role to Isis, and later, in the Islamic period, to Al-Saiyda Zainab.  

3

See Joyce Tyldesley, Nefertiti: Egypt’s Sun Queen (London: Penguin, 2005); Joyce Tyldesley, Nefertiti’s Face: The Creation of an Icon (London: Profile, 2018); Stephen K. Urice, ‘The Beautiful One Has Come—To Stay’, in Imperialism, Art and Restitution, ed. John Henry Merryman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 135–66.

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Figs. 1-3: Isis Lactans. Various figures found throughout the entire chronology of Egypt.

  All images in this chapter are from the personal archive of Monica Hanna. © Monica Hanna.

Fig. 4: The Virgin Mary taking up a similar position as the goddess Isis in traditional Isis Lactans iconography.

 

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Like Isis and the Virgin Mary, Saiyda Zainab is the patron deity of the weak, the poor, and the sick. Women of all classes in Egyptian society look for comfort either in the mosque of Al-Saiyda Zainab or the Church of the Virgin, where they come with their worries to pray, to be blessed, or to ask for fertility blessings, just as women went to the different temples of Isis or Hathor in antiquity. The image of the god Horus killing the hippopotamus, in the temple of Horus at Edfu, may have transferred to the Christian imagery of St George and the dragon.4 There are two sites dedicated to St George in Egypt; one is in the delta, and one is in the south, which generally corresponds to the locations of the temples of Horus.5 Also, girg (coming from Mar Girgis, that is, Martyr Girgis, or St George), is a word associated with harpooning, and the harpooner is also one of the titles of the god Horus, particularly at the temple at Edfu.

Fig. 5: Horus of Edfu killing the hippopotamus, which was a symbol of evil forces in ancient Egypt. Fig. 6: Traditional iconography of the Coptic St. George. Fig. 7: Horus of Edfu.

4 5

Elizabeth Wickett, Seers, Saints and Sinners: The Oral Tradition of Upper Egypt (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). Ibid.

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Modern Egyptians usually celebrate the holiday Sham el-Nessim on Easter Monday, saying that it goes back to the ancient Egyptian harvest feast. This is a modern misconception that has been propagated as a means to reappropriate ancient culture. I believe that the feast was related to the cult of Osiris after the spring equinox: Osiris was represented by black land, and when plants emerged from this fertile black soil it meant that he was resurrected, similar to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The story of Jesus, the son of God who came to earth and was killed, aligns closely with that of the myth of Osiris, who was killed by his envious brother Set. Furthermore, both Osiris and Jesus take similar journeys, Osiris to the underworld and, in the Christian scenario, Jesus to heaven, and both are given the power to judge mankind. Erik Hornung attempted to explain Egyptian religion in his book Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many.6 Monotheistic thought, he argues, was not very far from the ancient Egyptian conceptions of divinity. However, the cultural continuity between past and present does not stop at spiritual beliefs; it has persisted through Christianity and Islam also in the rituals associated with both religions. In the famous tomb painting of the pharaoh Tuthmosis III nursing from a sycamore tree, the pharaoh is suckling from a breast attached to the tree. An arm emerges from the other side of the tree to guide the breast into the pharaoh’s mouth. Depictions of the sycamore tree were often a representation of the goddess Hathor, who was revered as ‘Lady of the Sycamore’, and who was to emerge from the tree to offer cool water and delicious fruit. Most children in Upper Egypt grew up with a very famous lullaby, which does not make any sense to our modern understanding;7 its lyrics are roughly ‘To you who is going up the tree, bring down with you a cow, where you would feed me from its milk, and give it to me using a Chinese spoon. I was brought up by he who worshipped God, and so I entered the house of God, and I found the pigeons of God eating sugar.’ I remember Neama, who helped my grandmother, singing this to me many times, and now, in turn, I sing it to my daughter. Professor Fayza Haikal associates the cow (‫ )ةرقب‬of the lullaby with the goddess Hathor and thinks that perhaps it relates to the shift towards the other religions of Egypt, such as Christianity

6 7

Erik Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, transl. John Baines (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). In Arabic: ‫ينيصلا ةقلعملاب‬، ‫هللا دبع ينابر‬، ‫هللا تيب تلخد‬، ‫هللا مامح تيقل‬ ‫ركسلا يف شقرقيب‬،

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and Islam. The cow coming from the tree also quenches the thirst of those she takes care of. There are other interesting thoughts on the sycamore tree in Egypt that also show cultural continuity. In al-Matariya, a northern district of Cairo, there is the Shagaret Mariam (the tree of the Virgin Mary), where historically there was the Egyptian Tree of Life of Heliopolis; King Seti kneeling beside this tree is depicted in his temple in Abydos.8 The concept of the holy tree has its parallels in the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis. Winifred Blackman, in her ethnographic book The Fellahin of Upper Egypt, mentions a certain Sheikha Khadra in Senaru in Faiyum.9 The sheikha was said to be ‘in the tree’. Candles are placed on a tree dedicated to Khadra as offerings, as are locks of hair, charms, and other items. People eat the fruit of the tree as a cure for various illnesses and to be rid of the afarit, or ghosts. In Egypt there are also several places of worship and stories devoted to al-Nabi al-Khidr, a figure partially identified with St George; the version of the al-Khidr story in Alexandria is different from the version in Luxor. Within the city of Kafr al-Zayat, in the neighbourhood of al-Dahriya, there is a maqam (shrine) to al-Khidr that features two trees: visitors still light candles on the trees, carve wishes into the branches, and perform many rituals under the trees in the hopes of becoming cured from disease.10 Some have also told stories of receiving council from an oracle just by sleeping under one of the trees. Holy places have remained holy throughout the palimpsest of Egyptian history. For example, the mosque of Abu el-Haggag was built on the same site as the Luxor temple; that ancient Egyptian temple had been converted into a church in the Christian period, and the mosque was built in the medieval period for the saint, or wali, Abu el-Haggag on top of the temple’s ruins. Saints, or wali, in modern Egypt refer to an intermediary, between the people and God, capable of issuing blessings or curing disease. These saints usually have festival days that are called moulids. We celebrate the great moulid of the Prophet, peace be upon him, and I have witnessed in Aswan the moulid that is celebrated for several days, where the whole corniche is closed for riverfront

8 9 10

Marie-Louise Buhl, ‘The Goddesses of the Egyptian Tree Cult’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 6, no. 2 (April 1947): 80–97. Winifred S. Blackman, The Fellahin of Upper Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000). Anthony Sattin, The Pharaoh’s Shadow: Travels in Ancient and Modern Egypt (London: Eland, 2012).

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festivities that involve long processions and dhikr circles. Such festivities can only draw parallels with those for the ancient Egyptian gods, as evidenced by the descriptions of them found in temple inscriptions.

Figs. 8-11: The mosque of Abu el-Haggag, showing the palimpsest of Egyptian heritage. Fig. 9: Tuthmosis III being suckled by the Sycamore tree, which is a representation of the goddess Hathor

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The moulid of Abu el-Haggag, which is usually in October, involves placing the sheikh’s emblems onto boat-like vehicles touring the city of Luxor in very long processions. But why is the boat relevant here?11 There is absolutely no other reason except that more than two thousand years ago the god Amun was venerated in the Opet festival, where his statue was put on a bark shrine and carried by priests overland and in Nile processions between the Luxor and Karnak temples. The processions for both Amun and Abu el-Haggag have been characterized by playing music, drumming, and even magic. The feast of Amun had probably been on halt for a thousand years, until the arrival of Abu el-Haggag, when the Luxor temple was turned into a military encampment, so how did the Egyptians re-enact it for this Muslim sheikh? They must have seen depictions of the festival scenes and wanted to appropriate them—just as how modern Egyptians have reappropriated the ancient Sham el-Nessim into its current festival form. Perhaps remnants of the boat procession tradition had continued in Luxor, for other saints who are no longer venerated, and when veneration of Sheikh Abu el-Haggag began, a boat was used as part of that ritual as well.

11

See Shelley Wachsmann, ‘The Moulid of Abu el Haggag: A Contemporary Boat Festival in Egypt’, Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Ship Construction in Antiquity, Tropis VII, Pylos, 26–29 August 1999, ed. Harry Tzalas (Athens: Hellenistic Institute for the Preservation of Nautical Tradition, 2002); Pearce Paul Creasman and Noreen Doyle, ‘Overland Boat Transportation during the Pharaonic Period: Archaeology and Iconography’, Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 2, no. 3 (August 2010): 14–30; Megan Collier, ‘Ship of the God: The Amun-Userhet in New Kingdom Egypt’ (master’s thesis, Texas A&M University, 2013).

Repatriating Cultural Identity

Figs. 12, 13: Bark Shrine. The Opet festival celebration of the god Amun in Thebes.

The image on the right is from the tomb of Shajar al-Durr, who was murdered in 1257. It is decorated with lotus flower designs, similar to those which evolved on Byzantine columns. This shows how a decorative symbol of ancient Egypt persisted in the medieval period, and possibly other references and traditions from that history were alive then as well. Before then, there were also the writings of al-Massoudy in 972, which detail many of the Egyptian festivals and customs of that time.12 The Christian moulid is also not very different, where the image of the saint is carried in a long procession, with deacons dressed in white just as the ancient Egyptian priests, and the saint receiving offerings of incense and slaughtered animals. The saint’s image, toured in a procession called a zaffa, is similar to the procession during the moulid of al-Nabawi in a village of Upper Egypt. As in ancient Egypt, the saints, despite being dead, still have the power to bestow miracles, to heal the sick, and to help with problems of love and fertility, as well as with students’ exams, military conscription, and job prospects. Another very important cultural echo is that of the cult of the dead. The Greek historians Herodotus (fifth century BCE) and Diodorus Siculus (first century BCE) provide the most complete surviving evidence of how ancient Egyptians approached the preservation of a dead body. Before embalming, or preserving the corpse to delay or prevent decay, mourners, especially if the deceased had a high status, covered their faces with mud and paraded around town while beating their chests. The funeral procession to the tomb generally included cattle pulling the body in a sledge-like carrier, with friends and family following behind. During the procession, the priest burned incense and 12

Okasha El Daly, Egyptology: The Missing Millennium; Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings (London: UCL Press, 2005).

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poured milk before the body. Upon arrival at the tomb, and, essentially, the next life, the priest performed the ‘Opening of the Mouth’ ceremony: the deceased person’s head was turned towards the south, and the body was imagined to be a statue replica of the deceased. Opening the mouth symbolized allowing the person to speak and defend themselves during the judgement process. Goods were then offered to the deceased to conclude the ceremony. In order to live for all eternity and be presented in front of Osiris, a deceased person’s body had to be preserved by mummification, so that the soul could reunite with it and find pleasure in the afterlife. The main process of mummification was preserving the body by dehydrating it with natron, a natural salt found in the desert valley Wadi Natrun. The body was drained of all liquids and left with the skin, hair, and muscles preserved. During the mummification process, which is said to have taken up to seventy days, special priests worked as embalmers, treating and wrapping the body of the deceased in preparation for burial. The dehydration stage took forty days, and the second stage took thirty: this was the time when the deceased turned into a semi-divine being, and the abdominal cavity was emptied and rinsed again, first with wine and then oils. The oils were both for ritualistic purposes and for preventing the limbs and bones from breaking while being wrapped. The body was sometimes coloured with a golden resin, which protected it from bacteria and insects. Additionally, this practice was based on the belief that divine beings had flesh of gold. Next, the body was wrapped in linen strips, with amulets inserted into the bandaging, while a priest recited prayers and burned incense. The procession with the deceased was usually marked by women wailing and men carrying the coffin to the final resting place. In current custom, funeral processions in both Muslim and Christian contexts in Egypt are essentially the same, and strongly recall the processions of ancient Egypt.13 Related to the processions are the laments cried during them. Elizabeth Wickett has carried out an ethnographic study on the ancient and modern funerary laments of Upper Egypt, citing an ancient verse and providing a comparison:14 13 14

Elizabeth Wickett, For the Living and the Dead: The Funerary Laments of Upper Egypt, Ancient and Modern (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010). Elizabeth Wickett, ‘Funerary Lament and the Expression of Grief in the Transforming Landscape of Luxor,’ in ‘The Imaginary and the Documentary: Cultural Studies in Literature, and the Arts’, ed. Ferial J. Ghazoul, special issue, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 32  (2012): 111–126, 117.

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Tombs in ancient Egypt were created with a substructure for burial and a superstructure for the ‘public’ to come and interact with their deceased. This superstructure had a chapel vividly decorated with scenes from daily life along the valley of the Nile. The substructure carried the deceased, usually in a mummified manner, whereas the superstructure was the border between life and death where families and priests gathered to celebrate the cult of their deceased.15 Many tombs had a special prayer text, called ‘appeals to the living’, for the living visitors to say so that the spirit of the deceased would prosper in the afterlife.16 Much the same happens in modern Egypt. Visits to the dead are part of the ritual on regular feasts and Fridays. No matter whether they are Muslim or Christian, people go to recite prayers for the spirits of their deceased. In ancient Egypt, the rituals of visiting the dead were not so different, particularly at festivals such as the Festival of the Valley, where offerings of food, flowers, and incense were given to the deceased.17 Similarly, in mod15 16 17

Aidan Dodson and Salima Ikram, The Tomb in Ancient Egypt: Royal and Private Sepulchres from the Early Dynastic Period to the Romans (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008), 14. Dodson and Ikram, Tomb in Ancient Egypt, 15. Dodson and Ikram, Tomb in Ancient Egypt, 22.

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ern Egypt, food is distributed over the spirit of the dead and special buns are made called Rahma wa Nour (Mercy and Light). Ritualistic use of incense can be traced to the Coptic Church, where people today bring the names of their deceased to the altar usually on a piece of paper to be mentioned by the priest after the synaxarion of saints are read while the priest censes. The idea of also talking to the dead and asking the dead for help has continued from the past to the present and many letters to the dead are found in both these contexts. The third-century theologian Clement of Alexandria called Egypt ‘the mother of magic’. In ancient Egypt, magic was found everywhere: it was a central and integral part of everyday religious rites and habits.18 The modern concept of Egyptian baraka can be equated or compared with the ancient idea of Egyptian magic, heka.19 The ancient Egyptians imagined that all demons, monsters, and spirits lived under the ground, and hence many of the books written on the tombs described such journeys of the soul to the other life through this underground pathway. Similarly in modern Egypt, many Egyptians still believe that the afarit and djinn still live underground. Egyptians, both modern and ancient, believed these paranormal spirits also lived in the canals or riverbanks, and hence the modern story of El-Naddaha, who is a beautiful woman that lures men and disappears them. Echoes of that story can be found in both ancient Egyptian and Greek mythology. When my brother and I were little children, and our mother used to send us to our grandmother’s house in Minya, Neama used to tell us the story of the bau, who was a hidden spirit that suddenly appeared to children who went to bed without cleaning their teeth. To my surprise when I started studying the ancient Egyptian language, I found a reference to this concept of the bau. The concept in ancient Egypt was close to that in modern Egypt: the bau referred to the hidden spirit that represented the conscious that invited people to do what is right and not to break an oath. In Deir el-Medina, many exorcism texts have survived, and many of the current rituals practised by both Christian priests and Muslim sheikhs involve conducing a dialogue with the spirit who possesses a person.20 Furthermore, the ‘evil eye’ is a widely belived magical phenomenon that was written about particularly on Graeco-Roman papyri in Egypt and has spread its influence across the whole Middle East and Africa. A majority of modern Egyptians today believe in the evil eye and how 18 19 20

Geraldine Pinch, Magic in Ancient Egypt (London: British Museum Press, 2006), 47, 122. Pinch, Magic in Ancient Egypt, 12. Pinch, Magic in Ancient Egypt, 73.

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it can do serious harm to many people, and sometimes evidence is brought from both the Bible and Quran to support this idea. Magical rituals concerned with childbirth and infancy are also quite widespread in Egypt, and many include wearing special amulets similar in concept to those of ancient Egypt.21 Today in Egypt, particularly in its rural areas, magic is still practised for many reasons: the practice of El-Mandal is to find lost objects, and spells to reunite with loved ones or for fertility are also still widely practised. There are Coptic and Muslim magicians, known for love and fertility charms. There are also, of course, practitioners of black magic, who claim to possess the ability to inflict injuries and bring about illnesses, misfortunes, or sometimes death. Using the dead for inflicting harm on the living is also still practised,22 and many volunteers go to modern cemeteries to cleanse them from these harmcausing spells. In many moulids, there is always al-Rifa‘i, or the snake charmer. He is of a Sufi order with lineage that goes back to the twelfth-century Sheikh Ahmed al-Rifa‘i, and is of a profession of men who work to cleanse areas of snakes. The nineteenth-century scholar Edward Lane describes the Rifa‘i as subdivided into several distinct orders: the Ilwaniya are those who pretend to thrust iron spikes into their bodies, and the Saadiya are those who handle live, venomous serpents and scorpions with impunity.23 The snakes, however, have sometimes been operated on to remove their venomous fangs. In Egypt there are still many Rifa‘i and Saadee followers, and these dervishes earn their livelihoods through the practice of charming away snakes from houses and performing with serpents at the various moulids. Of course, some people believe the dervishes bring the snakes with them, in order to generate customers and earn more money. I had witnessed a case in Minya, in our home town, where the Rifa‘i, named Abou Talout, did this as his livelihood, sometimes selling the serpents he captured to zoos and collectors. Egypt is now facing both globalization and fundamentalism; both are detrimental to its cultural heritage and cultural continuity. The survival of

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Pinch, Magic in Ancient Egypt, 82. Pinch, Magic in Ancient Egypt, 160. Edward William Lane, Description of Egypt: Notes and Views in Egypt and Nubia, Made during the Years 1825, 26, 27, and 28: Chiefly Consisting of a Series of Descriptions and Delineations of the Monuments, Scenery, &c. of Those Countries; the Views, with Few Exceptions, Made with the Camera Lucida, ed. Jason Thompson (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000); Sattin, The Pharaoh’s Shadow.

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Egypt’s tangible heritage is directly related to its intangible heritage. The more people who identify, appropriate, and reuse the past, the more its tangible form has meaning and is preserved. I hope that this will also encourage more archaeologists and anthropologists to document what remains of this heritage across the villages of Egypt, and to do so both in Arabic for the Egyptian public and in English for those people like Professor Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, who ought to have a better understanding of modern Egypt than to repeat empty colonialist claims. Not only documentation, but also veneration, reliving and encouraging more interaction between the present and past through such intangible ties. I hope the future of Egyptian heritage is shaped by taking a greater pride in our past, in what we call the baladi (‘of the countryside’) tradition and looking at it as the thing that makes us different, unique, and what makes us truly the descendants of a great civilization that is alive to this day.

Bibliography Blackman, Winifred S. The Fellahin of Upper Egypt. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000. Buhl, Marie-Louise. ‘The Goddesses of the Egyptian Tree Cult’. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 6, no. 2 (April 1947): 80–97. Collier, Megan. ‘Ship of the God: The Amun-Userhet in New Kingdom Egypt’. Master’s thesis, Texas A&M University, 2013. Creasman, Pearce Paul, and Noreen Doyle. ‘Overland Boat Transportation during the Pharaonic Period: Archaeology and Iconography’. Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 2, no. 3 (August 2010): 14–30. Dodson, Aidan, and Salima Ikram. The Tomb in Ancient Egypt: Royal and Private Sepulchres from the Early Dynastic Period to the Romans. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008. El Daly, Okasha. Egyptology: The Missing Millennium; Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings. London: UCL Press, 2005. Haikal, Fayza. ‘Egypt’s Past Regenerated by Its Own People’. In Consuming Ancient Egypt, edited by Sally MacDonald and Michael Rice, 123–38. New York: Routledge, 2016. Hornung, Erik. Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. Translated by John Baines. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982. Lane, Edward William. Description of Egypt: Notes and Views in Egypt and Nubia, Made during the Years 1825, 26, 27, and 28: Chiefly Consisting of a Series of

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Descriptions and Delineations of the Monuments, Scenery, &c. of Those Countries; the Views, with Few Exceptions, Made with the Camera Lucida. Edited by Jason Thompson. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000. Pinch, Geraldine. Magic in Ancient Egypt. London: British Museum Press, 2006. Sattin, Anthony. The Pharaoh’s Shadow: Travels in Ancient and Modern Egypt. London: Eland, 2012. Tyldesley, Joyce. Nefertiti: Egypt’s Sun Queen. London: Penguin, 2005. Tyldesley, Joyce. Nefertiti’s Face: The Creation of an Icon. London: Profile, 2018. Urice, Stephen K. ‘The Beautiful One Has Come—To Stay’. In Imperialism, Art and Restitution, edited by John Henry Merryman, 135–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Wachsmann, Shelley. ‘The Moulid of Abu el Haggag: A Contemporary Boat Festival in Egypt’. Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Ship Construction in Antiquity, Tropis VII. Pylos, 26–29 August 1999, edited by Harry Tzalas. Athens: Hellenistic Institute for the Preservation of Nautical Tradition, 2002. Wickett, Elizabeth. Seers, Saints and Sinners: The Oral Tradition of Upper Egypt. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Wickett, Elizabeth. ‘Funerary Lament and the Expression of Grief in the Transforming Landscape of Luxor’. In ‘The Imaginary and the Documentary: Cultural Studies in Literature, and the Arts’, ed. Ferial J. Ghazoul. Special issue, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 32 (2012). Wickett, Elizabeth. For the Living and the Dead: The Funerary Laments of Upper Egypt, Ancient and Modern. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010.

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Die Völker der Erde (People of the Earth) With an Introduction by Ruth Stamm Rajkamal Kahlon

With a series of artworks under the title Die Völker der Erde (People of the Earth), which she started in 2017, the Berlin-based artist Rajkamal Kahlon intervenes in the still-circulating colonial narrations and inherent epistemic violence of an anthropology book originally published in the early twentieth century. Kahlon does so by cutting out the book’s pages and partly overpainting or repainting its photographic material. Her detailed gouache paintings not only challenge the colonial gaze of the reproduced ethnographic photographs, they also enter into a new dialogue with the historical material, transforming and radically altering the representation of the photographically depicted subjects. The original two-volume publication Die Völker der Erde, compiled by the German zoologist Kurt Lampert in 1902, is a typical example of the colonial construction of difference as practised by the disciplines of anthropology and ethnology at that time. The book’s photographs propagate an allegedly scientific but in fact deeply racist and objectifying gaze on ‘the others’ by categorizing them into different ‘ethnic types’ and exoticizing or sexualizing them as ‘uncivilized’, ‘savage’, and ‘primitive’. By means of a multidimensional appropriation of the book, Kahlon disrupts the circulation of a colonial and racist publication and also subverts its dominant order of knowledge, which she transfers into a mode of questioning; she ‘uses the original pages as a space for “talking back” to the book, its author, to the discipline of anthropology, to the representational violence of European colonial projects and to western knowledge production.’1 So far, the serial work given the same name of the original publication comprises three hundred loose book pages that Kahlon has, over 1

Rajkamal Kahlon, Artist’s statement on her website, accessed 16 February 2021, https: //www.rajkamalkahlon.com/copy-of-list-of-deaths.

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the past few years, rearranged and overpainted. Her use of bright colours, detailed figurative style, and partly surreal, humorous, or even grotesque motifs is especially striking. The medium of painting and the prominent materiality of the paint, particularly in contrast to the black-and-white photography of the printed pages, counter the hegemonic claim to (photographic) objectivity, as does Kahlon’s radically subjective imagery. Her depictions of explicit violence and torture, of grotesquely fragmented body parts as independent figures, of bandages and blood, unveil the hidden epistemic violence of the photographic representations as well as the physical violence of colonialism that is invisible in the photographs. Moreover, the rather sensitive covering of the images of objectified and often unclothed human bodies, mostly of women, is a response, as resistant as it is personal, to the voyeuristic colonial gaze. Yet Kahlon’s visual interventions do not only resist the colonial narrative of the anthropology book and its photographs through counternarrations. At the same time, Kahlon’s repaintings of the photographed bodies can be understood as artistic attempts to redefine ‘a different relation to the subjects of the photographs’2 in terms ‘of respect and solidarity’.3 She de-historicizes the colonial violence by visually foregrounding the continuities of colonial geopolitics and exploitation, as well as those of racist stereotypes in pictorial traditions—and by emphasizing their close entanglement. Thus, Kahlon unfixes the apparently ‘past’ and stable photographic representations while also destabilizing the former hierarchical relationship between the viewer and the photographed subjects. Moreover, by clothing them with contemporary fashion, hairstyles, and make-up, equipping them with weapons, or even situating them in current anti-colonial and anti-racist movements such as Black Lives Matter, she visually ‘restitut[es] (sometimes militant) agency’4 and power to the depicted. In this sense, her overpainting and repainting can also be seen as a fictive and retrospective, but nevertheless powerful, ‘gesture of healing and redemption’,5 in the artist’s own words. It is a reparative gesture that in2 3 4 5

Susanne Leeb, ‘Idioms: The Minor “a”s of Art’, in Texte zur Kunst 108 (December 2017): 32–55, 38. Ibid. Ibid. Rajkamal Kahlon, ‘Love and Loss in the Ethnographic Museum’, in Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in a Changing Europe, ed. Wayne Modest et al. (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2019), 100–109, 103; Kahlon refers here to her work Do You Know Our Names?, which also deals with photographic reproductions taken from Die Völker der Erde.

Die Völker der Erde (People of the Earth)

tervenes so effectively precisely because the series Die Völker der Erde (People of the Earth) does not primarily address a past colonial injustice but rather focuses on the ongoing dimensions of colonial violence. In this way, Kahlon approaches the anthropology book and its colonial imagery in a complex mode between ‘talking back’ and entering into a new dialogue, between appropriation and restitution, destruction and ‘repair’, referring to the past and shaping the present at the same time. Die Völker der Erde (People of the Earth) was first shown at Weltmuseum Wien as part of a larger artistic intervention by Kahlon into ethnographic material.6 While the pressing issue—especially for ethnographic museums such as the Weltmuseum—of the restitution of looted colonial art and artefacts in institutional contexts still seems to be inseparable from questions of the national, and of nation-states as ‘appropriate’ negotiating parties, Kahlon’s series in all its dimensions opens up broader perspectives on dealing with colonial photography. Her focus on the inherent violence of the photographic reproductions in Lampert’s Die Völker der Erde emphasizes the necessity to include photography collections in the current debates on restitution, reparation, and ‘repair’ while also raising the question of how far a restitution of colonial photographs in the legal frame of national or institutional exchanges can counter the violent, ‘predatory’ moment within the picture at all. In this sense, Kahlon’s visual intervention itself can be understood as an attempt of restitution—less in terms of national ‘property’ than in a transcultural, empathic, and reparative mode.

Bibliography Kahlon, Rajkamal. ‘Love and Loss in the Ethnographic Museum’. In Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in a Changing Europe, edited by Wayne Modest et al., 100–109. Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2019. Kahlon, Rajkamal. Artist’s statement on her website, https://www.rajkamalk ahlon.com/copy-of-list-of-deaths. Leeb, Susanne. ‘Idioms: The Minor “a”s of Art’. Texte zur Kunst 108 (December 2017): 32–55.     6

Weltmuseum Wien: ‘Rajkamal Kahlon: Staying with Trouble’, Vienna, 25 October 2017 to 8 January 2019.

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On the In-Betweenness of the Paintings of Jean Baptiste Vanmour (1671–1737) at the Rijksmuseum Mirjam Shatanawi

This essay considers how the Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands’ premier national museum, conceptualized and constructed ‘Islam’ through collecting, interpreting, and displaying a group of paintings made in the workshop of the Flemish-French painter Jean Baptiste Vanmour (1671–1737).1 Vanmour is best known for his portrayal of scenes in the Ottoman Empire. For much of the nineteenth century, the paintings were part of the collection of the Royal Cabinet of Curiosities in The Hague. When the Cabinet was dissolved in 1883, most of its collection was divided by classifying objects either as ‘art’ and ‘European’ (to be transferred to the Netherlands Museum for History and Art, which later merged with the Rijksmuseum) or ‘ethnology’ and ‘non-European’ (transferred to the Museum of Ethnology in Leiden). Using a biographical approach, I trace the trajectories of a number of the Islamic objects from the former Royal Cabinet collection, including the Vanmour paintings. I argue that because of the transcultural nature of these Islamic objects, they were subject to a certain in-betweenness: an elusiveness which allowed them to defy categorization according to cultures and museum disciplines. During the transfer in 1883, the Vanmour paintings were classified as ethnographic material and sent to the Museum of Ethnology, but eventually they were requisitioned by the Rijksmuseum. My analysis shows how, at the Rijksmuseum, the transcultural nature of the paintings was overlooked, thus favouring Eurocentric

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This chapter is part of the research program Framing Indonesian Art: Colonial Discourse and the Question of Islam, which is (partly) financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). I want to thank Jan de Hond and Bas Nederveen of the Rijksmuseum’s curatorial and collection information departments for their time and help in researching this essay. Jan de Hond and Eveline Sint Nicolaas are thanked for their comments on the manuscript.

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readings of Vanmour’s oeuvre. Finally, I will discuss how the Vanmour paintings have been instrumentalized in recent decades as part of national policies to integrate Turkish migrants in the Netherlands.

Islamic Art at the Rijksmuseum The Rijksmuseum, founded in 1800, is dedicated to Dutch art and history from the Middle Ages onward. Notwithstanding the museum’s national focus, Asian art has been part of the collection since its inception. Asian objects, predominantly originating in East Asia and South Asia, were integrated as belonging to the history of the Netherlands, especially in connection to the Dutch East India Company (VOC), or collected as ‘arts and crafts’ because of their superb craftsmanship.2 In contrast, with the exception of a brief period around 1900, Islamic art has never been a focus for the collection policy of the Rijksmuseum or its predecessors.3 The current Islamic art collection, which is arguably small but ‘does have some extraordinary collections and a few unique items’, owes its presence largely to coincidence.4 This collection, as defined by the museum, predominantly consists of ceramics from Iran and Ottoman Turkey and is supplemented by a collection of rare carpets from Mamluk Egypt and Iran, fragments of fabrics from Spain, Egypt, and Iran, and the odd miniature painting from (again) Iran. The paintings by Jean Baptiste Vanmour, who is well known for his portrayal of life in the Ottoman Empire, can be considered to be among the highlights of the Islamic collection, even though the museum frames them as European rather than Islamic, as will be outlined in this essay. Objects from the Muslim world entered the museum through being part of the contents of Dutch households, as was often the case for Oriental carpets, or through their connection to Dutch history, for instance, because they were brought back home as souvenirs by Dutch diplomats or as war trophies by admirals or military officers. In addition, Adriaan Pit (1860–1944), director of the Netherlands Museum for History and Art (NMHA) between 1898 and 1917,

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Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer, ‘Asian Art and the Rijksmuseum’, in Asian Art (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2014), 8–23. Jan de Hond, ‘Foreword’, Rijksmuseum Bulletin 59, no. 1 (2011): 2–5. Jan de Hond and Luitgard Mols, ‘A Mamluk Basin for a Sicilian Queen’, Rijksmuseum Bulletin 59, no. 1 (2011): 3.

On the In-Betweenness of the Paintings of Jean Baptiste Vanmour at the Rijksmuseum

built up a small collection of mainly ceramics and textile fragments under the rubric of ‘Oriental art’,5 and later in the twentieth century, private collections of ceramics and carpets were bequeathed to the museum.

Fig. 1: ‘Italian and Oriental art’ gallery at the Rijksmuseum, exhibiting Islamic and Italian pottery as well as Islamic carpets. Photograph, ca. 1938, by the Rijksmuseum image department. Collection Rijksmuseum inv. no. HA-0012109.

http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.HARCHIEF.12109.

Although Islamic art was only briefly a dedicated category in the Rijksmuseum’s collection policy, it unquestionably was a category in its exhibition narrative. In its approach to Islamic art, the Rijksmuseum followed international trends. Following the seminal 1910 exhibition Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst (Masterpieces of Mohammedan art) in Munich, Islamic objects, labelled ‘Oriental art’, were presented as singular works of art, to be admired for their 5

Pim Kievit, ‘Verzameld met Pit: Islamitische kunst in het Rijksmuseum 1898–1917’ (master’s thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2017).

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aesthetic value.6 Cross-cultural comparisons were regularly integrated in the displays, for instance, when Iranian, Ottoman, and Andalusian ceramics were paired with Italian maiolica (fig. 1). Between 1938 and 1992, part of the Islamic art collection was on display in a dedicated cabinet, which was designated as ‘Islamic art’ from 1956. After that, Islamic art dissolved as a rubric to identify objects in the collection, only to reappear shortly thereafter in conjunction with the growing percentage of Muslim migrants in the Dutch population and rising concerns over tensions between the West and the Islamic world. In 2015, the Rijksmuseum added a small display of Islamic art to the gallery showcasing the special collections (fig. 2). According to the Rijksmuseum’s website, one of the ideas behind the display is to highlight the Islamic world as ‘an important link between East and West’.7 During its decade of renovation (2003–2013), the museum had briefly contemplated the idea of opening an Islamic pavilion, similar to the Asian pavilion housing the Asian art collection. With this pavilion the Rijksmuseum aimed, first of all, to reach the sizeable Muslim community of the Netherlands, to which it felt obliged as the national museum of the Netherlands, and second, to become the country’s main centre for Islamic art. The Islamic pavilion never materialised, primarily due to practical concerns, including the small size of the Islamic collection. This is the context that informs the re-emergence of sixty-two oil paintings by Jean Baptiste Vanmour, dated between 1720 and 1737, in the early twentyfirst century.8

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Eva-Maria Troelenberg, ‘Islamic Art and the Invention of the Masterpiece’, in Islamic Art and the Museum: Approaches to Art and Archaeology of the Muslim World in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Benoît Junod, Georges Khalil, Stefan Weber, and Gerhard Wolf (London: Saqi Books, 2012), 183–88. Rijksmuseum, ‘Rijksmuseum toont Islamitische kunst—Nieuws—Nu in het museum’, Rijksmuseum, 20 March 2015, https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/nu-in-het-museum/nieu ws/rijksmuseum-toont-islamitische-kunst. Jean Baptiste Vanmour, sixty-two oil paintings, Istanbul, 1700–1737. Collection of the Rijksmuseum inv. nos. SK-A-1997/2052 and SK-A-4076/77/78/81/82/84. https://www.rijk smuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio/artists/jean-baptiste-vanmour.

On the In-Betweenness of the Paintings of Jean Baptiste Vanmour at the Rijksmuseum

Fig. 2: Display of Islamic objects at the Rijksmuseum. Photograph, 2019, by Thijs Gerbrandy.

Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum.

Colonial Narratives of Islamic Art and Material Culture Elsewhere I have argued that collections of Middle Eastern art and culture, and of the Islamic world more broadly, are a prime example of how colonial paradigms still live on in the structure of the museum landscape of the Netherlands, and of other European countries (Shatanawi 2021). In the nineteenth century, when multidisciplinary cabinets of curiosity were transformed into public museums that became increasingly more specialized and separated by discipline, Middle Eastern history and culture was broken up into different time periods (pre-Islamic, Islamic, and contemporary). Each of these time periods was studied through a different disciplinary tradition (archaeology, art history, and ethnology, respectively), and the corresponding collections became part of dedicated museums. Moreover, each stage in Middle Eastern history was associated with a different relationship to Europe. Museums presented the pre-Islamic past signified by Near Eastern archaeological artefacts as part of Europe’s own history, through narratives of the ‘cradle of civilization’ that first had to be ‘discovered’ by European archae-

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ologists in the nineteenth century.9 In the early twentieth century, several museums dedicated to European art founded Islamic art departments. In European eyes, the heyday of Islamic art was the early and medieval periods, and artistic production ostensibly halted around 1800, coinciding with the beginning of European colonization of the Muslim world.10 Through this narrative, Islamic art was presented as a bridge linking the artistic achievements of antiquity with Renaissance Europe.11 Thus, Islamic art was given a place as a category of art on par with European art, albeit distinctively non-European in nature. At the Rijksmuseum too, Islamic art was mainly appreciated for its influences on European arts and crafts. On the other end of the spectrum, the Middle East after the ‘death’ of Islamic art, that is, of the nineteenth and (early) twentieth centuries and hence the era of colonial domination, was represented in ethnographic museums that dedicated themselves to the study of ‘primitive cultures’. In the Netherlands, this was exemplified by the Museum of Ethnology (‘s Rijks Ethnographisch Museum) in Leiden,12 where late nineteenth-century collections of contemporary life in Western Arabia were housed.13 Thus, the formations of the museum landscape reflected the colonial trope of a once-glorious Middle East that went into decline and needed European assistance to make progress again.

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Mirjam Brusius, ‘Connecting the Ancient and the Modern Middle East in Museums and Public Space’, in Islam and Heritage in Europe: Pasts, Presents and Future Possibilities, ed. Katarzyna Puzon, Sharon Macdonald, and Mirjam Shatanawi (London: Routledge, 2021), 183–201. Finbarr Barry Flood, ‘From the Prophet to Postmodernism? New World Orders and the End of Islamic Art’, in Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and Its Institutions, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (London: Routledge, 2007), 31–53. Also: Heghnar Z. Watenpaugh, ‘Resonance and Circulation: The Category “Islamic Art and Architecture”’, in A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, ed. Finbarr Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), 2:1223–44. Gülru Necipoğlu, ‘The Concept of Islamic Art: Inherited Discourses and New Approaches’, In Islamic Art and the Museum: Approaches to Art and Archaeology of the Muslim World in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Benoît Junod, Georges Khalil, Stefan Weber, and Gerhard Wolf (London: Saqi Books, 2012), 57–75. The museum changed its name over the course of time, from ‘s Rijks Ethnographisch Museum (1837–1935) to Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde (1935–2005) to Museum Volkenkunde (Museum of Ethnology, since 2005). For uniformity’s sake I use Museum of Ethnology throughout the text. Luitgard E. M. Mols and Arnoud Vrolijk, Western Arabia in the Leiden Collections: Traces of a Colourful Past (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2016).

On the In-Betweenness of the Paintings of Jean Baptiste Vanmour at the Rijksmuseum

Today, this pattern of representing the Middle East in three disconnected stages, through collections of Near Eastern archaeology, Islamic art, and Middle Eastern ethnology, can still be found in museums across Europe. It implies a ‘hierarchy of value’ that connects to the hierarchies of difference within the European museumscape, assigning the most value to museums of European art and archaeology and the least to museums of non-Western everyday life.14 In this essay I closely follow the trajectory of the Vanmour paintings, as well as a number of Islam-related artefacts, in this process of defining and categorizing identities. My approach is diachronic, tracing how museum interpretations of these works have shifted over time. Europe has a long history of perceiving the Muslim cultures as ‘in-between’ cultures and Islam as a religion ‘in-between’ salvation and paganism. The words ‘Middle East’ already indicate this in-betweenness. Drawing on the work on ‘the social life of things’, a concept made popular through the work of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, this study takes a biographical approach to the Vanmour paintings—that is, to ‘follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories’.15 The heart of this study will be the moments when ‘things are in motion’, as they move from one collection to the other, in line with Appadurai’s argument that things move through different ‘regimes of value in space and time’.16 One decisive moment in the lives of the Vanmour paintings will be analysed: the dissolution of the Royal Cabinet of Curiosities (Koninklijk Kabinet van Zeldzaamheden) in 1883, when the majority of the collection was divided along the lines of ethnology versus craftsmanship. The moments when life-changing decisions were taken are particularly useful for historical inquiry because of the traces of argumentation they leave behind in the archives. In these instances of separation and classification, discontinuity can be identified.17 Yet, as we will see, the ‘underlying purposes and interests

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Sharon Macdonald, ‘New Constellations of Difference in Europe’s 21st-Century Museumscape’, Museum Anthropology 39, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 4–19. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 5. Appadurai, ‘Introduction’, 4. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992).

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are revealed even more clearly in moments when classifications were or are questioned, abandoned or overthrown’.18

The ‘Turkish’ Paintings of Jean Baptiste Vanmour Jean Baptiste Vanmour (1671–1737) lived and worked in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), where he dedicated himself to producing paintings for European patrons, primarily diplomats who commissioned him to depict official meetings and people of various communities. One of his customers was the Dutch diplomat Cornelis Calkoen (1696–1764), who had been appointed ambassador to the Ottoman court by the Dutch Republic in 1727. Calkoen commissioned around seventy paintings from Vanmour, including commemorative pictures of diplomatic audiences and portraits of Ottoman dignitaries, which served as tangible reminders of his time as a diplomat.19 The many scenes from social life and the portraits of citizens of different ethnic and professional backgrounds also had ethnographic meaning, providing a picture of Ottoman society for those back in the Netherlands.20 After his death in 1764, Calkoen’s collection of paintings went on a convoluted journey as they were transferred from one collection to another, finally ending up in the Rijksmuseum in 1902. Having no children, Calkoen left the paintings to his nephew, Abraham Calkoen (1729–1796), but he stipulated in his will that if his family were no longer interested in the paintings, they were to be sent to the Department of Levantine Trade (Directie van de Levantse Handel), a college representing the interests of merchants doing business with the Ottoman Empire and along the Mediterranean coast.21 The transfer to the college ultimately happened after Abraham’s death in 1796. Yet thirty years later, in 1826, the Department of Levantine Trade closed due to stagnant trade with the Levant, leaving the paintings homeless again. The Department’s 18

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Larissa Förster and Friedrich von Bose, ‘Concerning Curatorial Practice in Ethnological Museums: An Epistemology of Postcolonial Debates’, in Curatopia: Museums and the Future of Curatorship, ed. Philipp Schorch and Conal McCarthy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 44–55. Eveline Sint Nicolaas, ‘From Sultan to Swindler: Seven Portraits from Cornelis Calkoen’s Series of “Turkish Paintings”’, Rijksmuseum Bulletin 59, no. 1 (2011): 53. See also Daniel O’Quinn, Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Sint Nicolaas, ‘From Sultan to Swindler’, 38.

On the In-Betweenness of the Paintings of Jean Baptiste Vanmour at the Rijksmuseum

assets were turned over to the Ministry of the Interior, leaving its officials with the task of establishing whether Vanmour’s oeuvre had enough artistic merit to be transferred to the Royal Cabinet of Paintings. After a viewing of the collection of ‘Turkish paintings’, the Ministry decided against it and assigned them to the Royal Cabinet of Curiosities (or the ‘Ethnographisch Cabinet’), reasoning that ‘they have little or no artistic value’ and ‘they more belong there due to the nature of what they represent’.22 Evidently, when the Dutch trade with the Ottoman Empire dwindled, so did the importance of Vanmour’s paintings.

The Royal Cabinet of Curiosities (1816–1883) My analysis of the Vanmour paintings begins in 1883, when the Royal Cabinet of Curiosities was split up, an event of major consequences for the separation of European and non-European art.23 The Royal Cabinet of Curiosities was founded by the Dutch King Willem I in 1816, and it was consecutively housed in various buildings in The Hague. The holdings of the Royal Cabinet came from a variety of sources: a collection of objects relating to important events in Dutch history transferred from the Rijksmuseum; donations made to the Cabinet by private donors and private collections, including royal collections such as the curiosity collection of Stadtholder Willem V; and newly made acquisitions.24 A substantial part of the collection consisted of objects from ‘exotic’ origins, with the result that the museum was colloquially named the Ethnographic Cabinet. Historian Susan Legêne places the creation of the 22 23

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Letter from Van Ewijck to R. P. van de Kasteele, 17 January 1827. Archives of the Royal Cabinet of Curiosities, Noord-Hollands Archief 476.844/097 98. Mirjam Shatanawi, ‘Museum Narratives of Islam between Art, Archaeology and Ethnology: A Structural Injustice Approach’, in Islam and Heritage in Europe: Pasts, Presents and Future Possibilities, ed. Katarzyna Puzon, Sharon Macdonald, and Mirjam Shatanawi (London: Routledge, 2021), 163–82. Rudolf A. H. D. Effert, Royal Cabinets and Auxiliary Branches: Origins of the National Museum of Ethnology 1816–1883, CNWS Publications 159 (Leiden: CNWS, 2008). Also: Rudolf A. H. D. Effert, ‘The Royal Cabinet of Curiosities and the National Museum of Ethnography in the Nineteenth Century: From the Belief in the Superiority of Western Civilization to Comparative Ethnography’, in Museale Spezialisierung und Nationalisierung ab 1830: Das Neue Museum in Berlin im internationalen Kontext, ed. Ellinoor Bergvelt, Deborah Meijers, Lieske Tibbe, and Elsa van Wezel, Berliner Schriftenreihe zur Museumsforschung 29 (Berlin: G+H Verlag, 2011), 153–64.

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Cabinet in the context of the restoration of the monarchy in the Netherlands of 1813: The Dutch governors, diplomats and navy men who were sent to all corners of the world in order to regain Dutch overseas positions and possessions, were instructed to collect objects of art and culture both as a source of information and to testify of the Dutch international orientation at home. At the same time, politicians in the inner circles around the King donated objects that were regarded part of Dutch national history. Filling the Cabinet of Curiosities with this mix of collections was one of the ways to tie all these nation builders together and strengthen the nucleus around which the new nation evolved.25 When the Cabinet was dissolved, most of its collection of around 15,000 objects was divided between two museums: the ‘ethnographic’ objects were given to the Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, the European objects as well as objects relating to ‘comparative decorative arts’ (vergelijkende kunstindustrie) were donated to the Netherlands Museum for History and Art (NMHA), which was housed in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.26 The division happened in the midst of the rise of disciplinary museums and the desire to divide the world’s material culture into neatly bounded categories. Each object in the Cabinet’s collection was assessed on the basis of its European character, its aesthetic value, or its potential for advancement of the knowledge of the ‘entirely uncivilized and less civilized’ people of the world, as Lindor Serrurier (1846–1901), director of the Museum of Ethnology, proclaimed. For this last purpose, the extent of information available about the nature, use, and origin of an object was essential. Yet my analysis of the final division of objects between the museums shows that the crucial factor was perceptions about the primitiveness of cultures, rather than the availability of scientific knowledge.27 Objects were assigned to the Museum of Ethnology because the people who produced them were considered at a lesser evolutionary stage than Europeans, even if there 25

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Susan Legêne, ‘Ethnography and Colonialism after 1815: Non-Western Culture and Dutch Cultural Heritage’, in Tales from Academia: History of Anthropology in the Netherlands, ed. Han F. Vermeulen and Jean Kommers (Saarbrücken: Verlag für Entwicklungspolitik, 2002), 2:633. In 1927 the NMHA merged with the Rijksmuseum and the NMHA holdings became part of the latter museum’s collection. The Rijksmuseum currently owns 3,681 objects with a Royal Cabinet pedigree whereas the Museum of Ethnology has 10,259. Shatanawi, ‘Museum Narratives of Islam’.

On the In-Betweenness of the Paintings of Jean Baptiste Vanmour at the Rijksmuseum

was some appreciation for the aesthetic qualities of their material culture. Such was the fate of the objects from the Dutch East Indies, the Netherlands’ major colony. Conversely, the selection of holdings arriving at the Museum of Ethnology included objects about which Serrurier and his staff had little or no knowledge, but which simply did not fit the criteria of artistry (kunstzin) as employed by the NMHA. Among these were the Vanmour paintings, which were classified as ethnographic material and sent to the Museum of Ethnology, although two decades later the paintings were requisitioned by the Rijksmuseum. The Royal Cabinet collection contained around three hundred Islamic objects. Among them were Moroccan slippers, Persian weapons, Ottoman almanacs, talismans from Sumatra, and keris daggers donated as presents by Indonesian sultans; however, as far as I have seen, none were described as Islamic. About half of the Islamic objects in the collection were paintings made in Ottoman Turkey or Mughal India for a European clientele. They included sixty-six early- to mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman album paintings that were made to satisfy a European curiosity about how Ottomans dressed and how their army was organized.28 Ottoman costume books were often commissioned by European diplomats so they could identify the palace dignitaries and military staff with whom they had to interact.29 The Vanmour paintings, the costume albums, and the Indian paintings in the collection of the Royal Cabinet of Curiosities must all be seen in the light of how European travellers and diplomats ‘collected’ Islamic cultures in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: through representation in paintings, drawings, and

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In the Royal Cabinet of Curiosities there were three sets of Ottoman costume album paintings. All seem to have been acquired by the Royal Cabinet through purchase, perhaps through the intervention of the Dutch consuls to the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman album paintings, Istanbul, ca. 1826–1840. Collection of the National Museum of World Cultures inv. nos. RV-360-7364/7429, https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11840/650429. Elisabeth Fraser, ‘The Color of the Orient: On Ottoman Costume Albums, European Print Culture, and Cross-Cultural Exchange’, in Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Practices and Global Contexts, ed. Tara Zanardi and Lynda Klich (London: Routledge, 2018), 45–59.

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costumes rather than actual objects.30 The representational nature of these paintings led to a certain equivocality which left them suspended between Europe and the Muslim world, but when hard disciplinary boundaries were drawn in the nineteenth century, all of them were allocated to the Museum of Ethnology. In fact, so were most of the Islamic objects from the Royal Cabinet.

The Consequences of Worlds Apart With the 1883 division of the Royal Cabinet of Curiosities, curators and museum directors aimed to distinguish ‘art’, a category epitomizing Western creativity, from ‘ethnology’, comprising objects collected as scientific evidence: ‘documents kept as guides to non-European people and natural history rather than as records of human ingenuity and artistry’.31 Tony Bennett has argued that ethnology, as a discipline, was crucial in connecting the histories of European nations to those of the rest of the world, ‘but only by separating the two in providing for an interrupted continuity in the order of peoples and races—one in which “primitive peoples” dropped out of history altogether in order to occupy a twilight zone between nature and culture.’32 In the binary setup of museum representation emerging under colonialism, Oriental civilisations (i.e. China and Japan) were assigned an intermediate position ‘either as having at one time been subject to development but subsequently degenerating into statis or as embodying achievements of civilization which, while developed by their own lights, were judged inferior to the standards set by Europe’.33 In 1883, the Middle East in the period before colonization (the so30

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Nebahat Avcıoğlu, ‘Turquerie’ and the Politics of Representation, 1728–1876 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). Also: Wendy M. K. Shaw, ‘Signs of Empire: Islamic Art Museums from European Imperialism to the Global Empire of Capital’, in Collecting and Empires: An Historical and Global Perspective, ed. Maia W. Gahtan and Eva-Maria Troelenberg (London: Harvey Miller, 2019), 354–71. Katharine Conley, ‘Is Reconciliation Possible? Non-Western Objects at the Menil Collection and the Quai Branly Museum’, South Central Review 27, no. 3 (September 2010): 45. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 77. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 82. For that reason, the Royal Cabinet’s collections from Japan and China were indeed divided between the Rijksmuseum and the Museum of Ethnology, more or less according to the agreed division; see Effert, Royal Cabinets and Auxiliary Branches, and Jan van Campen, De Haagse jurist Jean Theodore Royer (1737–1807)

On the In-Betweenness of the Paintings of Jean Baptiste Vanmour at the Rijksmuseum

called Islamic period) was not yet allotted such an in-between position—as would be the case a few decades later. In line with this, Islamic objects were only assigned to the NMHA if they had an evident connection to Dutch history or if they were considered European. After the great split of the collection of the Royal Cabinet of Curiosities, objects were regularly moved from one collection to another, whenever museum directors and curators decided that an item no longer fit within any of the profiles of their collections. In the case of the Rijksmuseum these transfers aimed to complete the removal of non-European items; on various occasions, when such objects were found, they were transferred to the Museum of Ethnology.34 When, in 1931, the Rijksmuseum deaccessioned thirty-three ‘exotic’ musical instruments, its main argument contended that they fell outside the ‘nature of our European musical instruments’.35 Although the transfers aimed to ‘create worlds apart’,36 it is questionable whether they succeeded in doing so. Could Europe indeed be partitioned off from the rest of the world, including the Islamic regions? And what did European culture mean in the context of these collections?

Object Lessons for the Exchange between Europe and the Muslim World Let’s take a closer look at some of the Islamic objects involved in the division of the Royal Cabinet of Curiosities and their relation to Europe. Among the collectibles in the Royal Cabinet was, for instance, a Mamluk basin made in Egypt or Syria for Elizabeth of Carinthia (ca. 1300–1350), Queen of Sicily, of

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en zijn verzameling Chinese voorwerpen (Hilversum: Verloren, 2000). See Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), for the intermediate position of Oriental art between art and ethnology. The Rijksmuseum and its predecessors transferred objects to the Museum of Ethnology on four occasions: in 1901, 1931, 1937, and 1953, including Islamic objects from the former Royal Cabinet of Curiosities. Letter from Frederik Schmidt Degener to the Minister of Education, Culture and Science, 24 November 1930, Noord-Hollands Archief 476.1223_016/017. Thirty-three musical instruments, China, Indonesia, West and Central Africa, 19th century. Collection of the National Museum of World Cultures, inv. nos. RV-2231-1/28. Legêne, ‘Ethnography and Colonialism after 1815’.

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which the interior is decorated with Arab-Islamic motifs and texts while the exterior appears European and features an inscription in Latin (fig. 3). When the Royal Cabinet collection was split up, the basin was assigned to the NMHA as a European work of art. Indeed, on closer inspection, the Arab style of the inside shows distinctively European features, such as three coats of arms and the depiction of rulers wearing crowns similar to those worn by Christian kings. Unsure how to interpret the Mamluk basin, the Rijksmuseum permanently loaned it to the Museum of Ethnology in 1953, along with fifteen other non-Western objects, the majority of Islamic origin, claiming that the objects ‘fitted in better’ with the ethnographic collections.37 The basin went back to the Rijksmuseum in 1959 for unknown reasons. Five decades later the basin was reinterpreted as a ‘unique example of the artistic exchange between the Christian and Islamic worlds’.38 As it is likely to have been made on commission for Elizabeth of Carinthia, the basin was then seen as a perfect illustration of the intense contacts between Southern Europe and the Islamic regions of the Mediterranean and, thus, of cross-cultural exchange within the premodern world. Since the reopening of the Rijksmuseum in 2013, the Mamluk basin has been on display in the theme room ‘Christian Art in the Netherlands’. The accompanying label identifies it as ‘an exotic vessel’ and ‘an Islamic art object that found its way to the Christian West’, thus giving the basin a new role as a cultural ambassador.39 The interpretational history of the Mamluk basin demonstrates how objects move through different regimes of meaning-making. In its afterlife as a museum object held by the Rijksmuseum, the classification of the basin oscillated between European and Islamic. The most recent interpretation, on the exhibition label, shows the attractiveness of museum holdings that can serve as ‘object lessons’ of the interaction between Europe and the Muslim world. Muslim migration to the Netherlands and geopolitical events have made objects like these, demonstrating relationships of exchange between Europe and the Islamic world, particularly sought after. In the Netherlands, the migration of laborers from Morocco and Turkey from the late 1960s to the 1980s, followed by the arrival of refugees from countries such as Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, have resulted in a growing presence of Muslims in Dutch society. From around

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Letter from David Röell to the Minister of Education, Arts, and Science, 18 December 1952, Museum of Ethnology file, Rijksmuseum archives, no inventory number. De Hond and Mols, ‘A Mamluk Basin for a Sicilian Queen’, 29. Exhibition label as seen on 20 September 2018.

On the In-Betweenness of the Paintings of Jean Baptiste Vanmour at the Rijksmuseum

the turn of the twenty-first century, the Rijksmuseum has sought ways to address these demographic changes. The inclusion of Islamic objects in the renovated galleries as of 2013 is one of the outcomes.

Fig. 3: Mamluk basin, Egypt or Syria, ca. 1322–1350. Collection Rijksmuseum inv. no. BK–NM–7474.

http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.15231.

The Rijksmuseum has made the deliberate choice to spread the Islamic objects in its collection across various thematic and temporal galleries. They are scattered across displays, such as the galleries of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (the Mamluk basin), in the armoury section of the special collections, and, of course, the Vanmour paintings are hung in the gallery of the eighteenth century. One display showing several Islamic objects together is located in the gallery showcasing the special collections, where objects are arranged according to object type or material (fig. 2). The Islamic exhibits here are part of a larger section of porcelain items that demonstrate, among other things, their connections to European and Chinese ceramics. The Rijksmuseum’s choice to arrange its Islamic objects in this dispersed way positions the Islamic world firmly within the narrative of (art) history and positively emphasizes its connections to Europe. What is particularly striking, though, is the near absence of any reference to Islam as a religion in the museum. Clearly, given the origin of the Islamic collection, with a strong emphasis on

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Iranian art as well as on ‘secular’ objects, the prime point of identification for any Dutch visitor of Moroccan or Turkish heritage would be the use of the term ‘Islamic’. Here the Rijksmuseum follows the common interpretation of Islamic art, understood as ‘a regional and cultural definition, not a religious one’.40 In other words, through the ‘Islamic’ in Islamic art, a common identity through a shared Muslim culture, emptied of its religious meaning, is to be forged.

The In-Betweenness of Islamic Things Heterogeneity was the main reason why the Islamic objects of the Royal Cabinet of Curiosities existed in relative obscurity after the 1883 dissolution of the cabinet and the redistribution that followed. In fact, a large proportion of these objects demonstrate a hybridity in style and a distinct in-betweenness in relation to Europe and the Islamic world, regardless of whether they ended up in the collections of the Rijksmuseum or the Museum of Ethnology. Paul Basu uses anthropologist Tim Ingold’s concept of ‘in-betweenness’ to describe the position of objects in the museum.41 Ingold emphasizes the difference between ‘between’ and ‘in-between’.42 The ‘between’ sets out to create an intermediate space joining two elements. In-betweenness, on the other hand, has no fixed location; it is ‘an interstitial differentiation’,43 ‘a middle space, a contact zone, a borderland’44 where, as Ingold puts it, ‘between is liminal, in-between is arterial; where between is intermediate, in-between is midstream’.45 Museum objects are in-between in the sense that they all are ‘entanglements of ongoing social, spatial, temporal and material trajectories and relationships, dislocations and relocations’.46 Thus, to look at things as ‘in-between’ is to understand the world as essentially connected and always in flux. 40 41

42 43 44 45 46

De Hond, ‘Foreword’, 5. See also Watenpaugh, ‘Resonance and Circulation’. Paul Basu, ‘The Inbetweenness of Things’, in The Inbetweenness of Things: Materializing Mediation and Movement between Worlds, ed. Paul Basu (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 1–20. Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015). Ingold, Life of Lines, 147. Basu, ‘Inbetweenness of Things’, 8. Ingold, Life of Lines, 147. Basu, ‘Inbetweenness of Things’, 2.

On the In-Betweenness of the Paintings of Jean Baptiste Vanmour at the Rijksmuseum

In addition to looking through the lens of in-betweenness, theories of transculturality and transculturation could also be applied to these objects. While acknowledging that the notion of transculturality has sometimes been criticized for putting an emphasis on the dominant cultural group, e.g. Europe, and marginalizing indigenous perspectives,47 I am using the term in the definition of the German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch, which emphasizes the internal complexities and constant variations in cultural expressions.48 Welsch recognizes that cultures are inseparably linked with one another, to a degree that one can no longer speak about separate cultures. Looking at the world through the lens of transculturality means rejecting the notion of cultures as homogeneous, self-contained entities and emphasizing instead how culture transgresses borders, overlaps, and intermingles.49 As Welsch writes, it’s just that now the differences no longer come about through a juxtaposition of clearly delineated cultures (like in a mosaic), but result between transcultural networks, which have some things in common while differing in others, showing overlaps and distinctions at the same time. The mechanics of differentiation has become more complex, but it has also become genuinely cultural for the very first time, no longer complying with geographical or national stipulations, but following pure cultural interchange processes.50 The concept of in-betweenness has much in common with transculturality, as it argues for a paradigm where objects are not one thing or another (‘Islamic’ or ‘European’, ‘art’ or ‘ethnology’) but a multiplicity of things at once. But, additionally, it emphasizes that objects can move between different disciplinary regimes and, in this way, it rejects the taxonomic traditions of the European museum—which tend to categorize objects using bounded notions of period, place, and purpose. Regarding this last point, it also has commonalities with the idea of boundary objects—objects that inhabit several intersecting social

47 48

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Madeline Rose Knickerbocker and Lisa Truong, ‘The Indigenization of the Transcultural Teacup in Colonial Canada’, in Basu, Inbetweenness of Things, 211–30. Wolfgang Welsch, ‘Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today’, in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (London: SAGE Publications, 1999), 195–213. Marija Jurić Pahor, ‘Transculturality’, in The International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017) 1–5. Welsch, ‘Transculturality’, 203.

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worlds and which are used in different ways by different (academic) communities.51 Surely, the difficulty in classifying the Islamic objects coming from the Netherlands’ Royal Cabinet of Curiosities partly arose from the circumstance that they could simultaneously inhabit two worlds: that of art history and that of ethnology. The presence of a multitude of transcultural objects in the Royal Cabinet is indicative of a collecting tradition that was less obsessed with classification and categorization than the museums that would succeed it. Whereas heterogeneity was considered an asset for a cabinet of curiosity, it became a problem in the modern museum.52 As Bennett observes, the artefacts—such as geological specimens, works of art, curiosities and anatomical remains—which had been displayed cheek by jowl in the museum’s early precursors in testimony to the rich diversity of the chain of universal being, or which had later been laid out on a table in accordance with the principles of classification, had, by roughly the mid-nineteenth century, been wrenched from both these spaces of representation and were in the process of being ushered into the new one constituted by the relations between the evolutionary series organised by each of these knowledges.53 Indeed, although the first director of the Royal Cabinet, Reinier Pieter van de Kasteele (1767–1845), certainly had scientific aspirations,54 the collection was a typical example of such an ‘array of curious things’, a cabinet where objects were ‘assembled according to a more idiosyncratic, speculative logic such as might have been devised before we imagined we were “modern”’.55 Yet this idiosyncrasy does not merely arrive from their freer arrangement; it is also embedded in the objects themselves. As Basu has argued, these objects are expressions of processes in time and space, halted in the in-between.56 In fact, it is precisely the elusive nature of these objects that makes their assignment

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Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, ‘Institutional Ecology, “Translations” and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39’, Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3 (August 1989): 387–420. Kevin Hetherington, ‘From Blindness to Blindness: Museums, Heterogeneity and the Subject’, supplement in Sociological Review 47, no. S1 (May 1999): 51–73. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 97. Effert, ‘Royal Cabinet of Curiosities’. Basu, ‘Inbetweenness of Things’, 1. Basu, ‘Inbetweenness of Things’.

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to categories such as ‘art’ or ‘ethnology’, ‘Europe’ or ‘non-Europe’, look rather arbitrary to contemporary eyes.

A Transcultural Reading of the Vanmour Paintings Although most Islamic objects of the former collections of the Royal Cabinet of Curiosities led a life of relative obscurity after the split of 1883, a number of them rose to prominence in the late twentieth century when, in the wake of 9/11 and migration to Europe, interest in Islam and the Middle East intensified. In the following, I will focus on the fate of the paintings by Vanmour from the twentieth century to the present. As paintings depicting Ottoman subjects, the Vanmour collection is an illuminating example of how, in this period, Islam-related artefacts have been interpreted in shifting political frameworks. In my investigation of the paintings, I am drawing on the work of Elisabeth Fraser as well as that of Alexander Bevilacqua and Helen Pfeifer.57 These authors have in common an analysis of the European interest in Ottoman culture as a reciprocal phenomenon in which Ottomans played a key role. As Bevilacqua and Pfeifer write, ‘Ottoman objects did not travel naked: they were wrapped in layers of meaning’.58 Likewise, Nebahat Avcıoğlu and Finbarr Barry Flood have pointed out the multidirectionality of exchange between the Middle East and Europe during the eighteenth century.59 In a similar vein, Elisabeth Fraser argues for an understanding of cultural mediation as ‘layered, discontinuous, and resulting from a multiplicity of points of contact and exchange’.60 Fraser has described the Ottoman costume album, a genre of paintings produced from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, as a collaborative object that connected Ottoman society with Europeans, and as an agent of contact in the early modern world. The albums consisted of a collection of individual sheets depicting Ottomans in costumes typifying their professions or ethnic origins, as they were chiefly made for European clients.

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Fraser, ‘Color of the Orient’; Alexander Bevilacqua and Helen Pfeifer, ‘Turquerie: Culture in Motion, 1650–1750’, Past & Present 221 (November 2013): 76. Bevilacqua and Pfeifer, ‘Turquerie’, 76. Nebahat Avcıoğlu and Finbarr Barry Flood, ‘Introduction: Globalizing Cultures: Art and Mobility in the Eighteenth Century’, Ars Orientalis 39 (2010): 7–38. Elisabeth Fraser, ‘Color of the Orient’, 46.

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Being much sought after, the paintings were present in quite a few public and private collections in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, including the Royal Cabinet of Curiosities. Yet the Ottoman costume paintings were not one-to-one representations of Ottomans, nor were they entirely guided by the demands of their European commissioners; rather, they were the result of a negotiation of styles that went back and forth: ‘from the beginning [they had] one foot in the Ottoman and one in the European pictorial traditions’.61 Similarly, the paintings produced in Vanmour’s workshop suggest a mixture of artistic traditions. In fact, Vanmour started his career in Constantinople with the commission of one hundred oil paintings in costume-album style for French ambassador Charles de Ferriol. Not only was Vanmour familiar with the conventions of Ottoman painting, he also employed local artists in order to maintain a fast pace of production. The result were compositions revealing both Ottoman and European influences, and perspectival designs that met Ottoman rather than European standards. Vanmour’s portrait of Sultan Ahmed III (fig. 4), for instance, depicts the ruler in the company of two attendants, following a late sixteenth-century Ottoman convention, while showing the Sultan with a staff of office, an object which is a European motif.62 Influences from the genre of the costume album can likewise be detected in the resemblance between the paintings from Vanmour’s workshop and those seen in costume albums. Vanmour’s depiction of Üçanbarli Mehmed Efendi (fig. 5), the Reis Effendi or Head of the Chancery, shows similarities in composition and dress with paintings of the same subject by court artist Musavvir Hüseyin (active 1680s–1690s), with a number of adaptations for the European viewer.63

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Bevilacqua and Pfeifer, ‘Turquerie’, 81. Bevilacqua and Pfeifer, ‘Turquerie’, 76; Sint Nicolaas, ‘From Sultan to Swindler’, 41. Bevilacqua and Pfeifer, ‘Turquerie’, 85.

On the In-Betweenness of the Paintings of Jean Baptiste Vanmour at the Rijksmuseum

Fig. 4 (left): Jean Baptiste Vanmour, ‘Sultan Ahmed III’, Istanbul, ca. 1727–1730. Collection Rijksmuseum inv. no. SK-A-2013. Fig. 5 (right): Jean Baptiste Vanmour, ‘The Reis Effendi, Head of the Chancery’, Istanbul, ca. 1727–1730. Collection Rijksmuseum inv. no. SK-A-2024.

  (left): http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5651. (right): http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5640.

Interpreting Vanmour at the Rijksmuseum The nonconformity of Jean Baptiste Vanmour’s artistic production to European standards runs like a thread through the reception of his oeuvre as well as of the artists working for Vanmour. In 1826, the paintings were owned by the Department of Levantine Trade in Amsterdam. That year, as we have seen, the department was dissolved and the paintings were assigned to the Royal Cabinet of Curiosities because of their documentary value. When the Cabinet of Curiosities, in turn, was dissolved, most the Vanmour paintings were assigned to the Museum of Ethnology, probably for similar reasons.64 They 64

There is no reference to the paintings in the correspondence about the break-up of the Royal Cabinet of Curiosities. Barthold van Riemsdijk, director of the Rijksmuseum, thought that the Museum of Ethnology received the ‘purely Oriental’ paintings,

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were still there, framed and locked up in storage, in 1901, when the Rijksmuseum received an ‘excited’ letter from the French diplomat Auguste Boppe (1862–1921).65 Boppe was working on a comprehensive volume on the Orientalist painters working in Istanbul in the eighteenth century, a work which would appear under the title Les peintres du Bosphore au xviiie siècle (1911), and he was now looking for the Vanmour paintings once belonging to Calkoen’s assets. Barthold van Riemsdijk (1850–1942), director of the Rijksmuseum, began to realize the importance of the paintings and started a search for their whereabouts. Victor de Stuers (1843–1916), chief of the Ministry of the Interior’s Department of Arts and Sciences and a high-profile public intellectual, was one of those consulted. De Stuers’s verdict shows his familiarity with one of the most common tropes about Islamic art, its aniconism: ‘they consist of two series—one is dryly and crudely painted, the other one is mellow and artistic. Highly interesting for the manners and costumes of the Constantinople court, in particular when considering that the Mohammedans do not tolerate imagery.… The artistic series seems French work to me’.66 By June 1902, Van Riemsdijk had learned the paintings were part of the collections of the Museum of Ethnology and that a number were located at the Netherlands Museum for History and Art. He sent a request for reunification of the works. The answer of NMHA director Adriaan Pit was rather laconic, considering his self-proclaimed love for what he called ‘Oriental art’: ‘that’s fine with me … and it pleases me even more that we are finally discovering what they mean’.67 The ‘Turkish paintings’ were subsequently transferred from the two museums to the Rijksmuseum to be placed in a dedicated room, the ‘Turkish cabinet’, where they were on exhibit at least until 1909 (fig. 6). In the Rijksmuseum

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whereas the NMHA received the paintings depicting Europeans or which bear relationship to the Dutch history of trade; see Rijksmuseum, ‘Jaarverslag van het Rijksmuseum’, in Verslagen omtrent ’s rijks verzamelingen van geschiedenis en kunst (’s Gravenhage: Staatsdrukkerij- en uitgeverijbedrijf, 1902), 8. This reasoning is not entirely valid, as the NMHA received a painting depicting Mevlevi dervishes (SK-A-4081) besides most of the paintings of diplomatic audiences. ‘Schilderijen door J.B. Vanmour uit het Rijks Ethnografisch Museum te Leiden met stukken betreffende onderzoek over de verzameling’, Archives of the Cabinet of Paintings, Noord-Hollands Archief 476.362. Letter from Victor de Stuers to Barthold van Riemsdijk (?), 23 October 1901, Archives of the Cabinet of Paintings, Noord-Hollands Archief 476.362_072/074. Letter from Adriaan Pit to Barthold van Riemsdijk, 30 June 1902, Archives of the Cabinet of Paintings, Noord-Hollands Archief 476.362_007.

On the In-Betweenness of the Paintings of Jean Baptiste Vanmour at the Rijksmuseum

collection, the paintings were seen as rather insignificant, especially by the curators of the art history department, who judged them as artistically inferior; only occasionally were they taken out for display.68 This changed in 2003, when they were restored with the support of the Koçbank and relaunched in a major exhibition entitled De ambassadeur, de sultan en de kunstenaar: op audiëntie in Istanbul (The ambassador, the sultan and the artist: An audience in Istanbul). This event signalled a change of approach; the paintings were now counted among the most valuable multicultural holdings of the Rijksmuseum.

Fig. 6: S. Bakker Jz., Turkish Cabinet at the Rijksmuseum, ca. 1909. Collection Rijksmuseum inv. no. RMA-SSA-F-00029-1.

http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.HARCHIEF.868.

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For instance, they were part of two smaller temporary displays entitled Oosterse tapijten uit de schenking Van Aardenne (Oriental carpets of the Van Aardenne donation, 1977) and Het Turkse hofleven in de 18de eeuw (Turkish court life in the 18th century, 1978) respectively.

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Relaunching Vanmour: An Ambassador for a Culturally Diverse Europe As we have seen, from around the turn of the twenty-first century, the Rijksmuseum has been looking for ways to include an increasingly culturally diverse Dutch population in its galleries. The exhibition De ambassadeur, de sultan en de kunstenaar took place as diversity policies were introduced in the field of arts and culture. Using targeted budgets, the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Sciences tried not only to encourage migrant communities (allochtonen or ‘allochthonous people’) to take advantage of the facilities available but also to induce the native Dutch population (autochtonen or ‘autochthonous people’) to show more interest in the multicultural society that the Netherlands had become. The newly introduced policies followed the same principles as the general government policy: migrants were addressed as ethnic minorities, with an emphasis on their ‘own’ culture. During this period, experiments with cultural diversity in Dutch museums intensified. Furthermore, Turkey was one of countries targeted for shared cultural heritage projects, which are one of the priorities of the Netherlands’ international cultural policy.69 The objectives of the Vanmour exhibition are a one-to-one reflection of the Ministry’s policy targets, as the Rijksmuseum’s reporting speaks about the paintings as ‘an excellent opportunity to approach a new target group, and to inform the wider audience of the mutual history of the Netherlands and Turkey’ (Rijksmuseum 2003, 32).70 Moreover, the museum aimed to contribute to the development of a stronger sense of identity and self-esteem in its Turkish-Dutch visitors.71 The exhibition was well visited by people of Turkish heritage, who were pleased to see the splendour of Ottoman heritage represented, making it the first time a large group of ‘allochtonen’ visited the Rijksmuseum (Rijksmuseum 2003, 34).72 The educational programme en69

70 71 72

Shared cultural heritage has been one of the priorities of the Netherlands’ international cultural policy since 1997. The focus is on countries that have had historical ties with the Netherlands, in particular, former colonies. For a critique of the concept and practice of shared heritage, see Bloembergen and Eickhoff, ‘Travelling Far on “Rather Short Legs”’: Company-Furniture on the Move and the Problem of Shared Heritage’, IIAS Newsletter 59 (Spring 2012): 30–31. Rijksmuseum, ‘Jaarverslag’ (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2003), 32. Proposal for the educational program, June 26, 2001, p. 5, De ambassadeur, de sultan en de kunstenaar exhibition file, Rijksmuseum archives, no inventory number. Rijksmuseum, ‘Jaarverslag’, 34.

On the In-Betweenness of the Paintings of Jean Baptiste Vanmour at the Rijksmuseum

couraged identification of Turkish visitors with the subjects of the paintings: ‘many times, visitors spontaneously engaged in conversation with each other, exchanging information about their own customs and habits. For example, many recognized the details in one of the paintings, with the Turkish lying-in room, where coffee is served and rosewater passed around, as well as the perfume sprinkler’ (fig. 7).73 The Orientalist undertone of these observations, and the apparent inability to distinguish between dramatized representations of palace women living 300 years ago and the lives of Turkish-Dutch women in the early twenty-first century, pinpoints the shortcomings of diversity policies based on the ‘own’ cultures of ethnic minority groups.

Fig. 7: Jean Baptiste Vanmour, ‘Lying-in Room of a Distinguished Turkish Woman’, ca. 1720–1737. Collection Rijksmuseum inv. no. SK-A-2003.

http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5645.

In the media and other communication channels, the museum did not refrain from belittling the artistic quality of the paintings. The catalogue essay written by Duncan Bull, co-curator of the exhibition, is full of qualifications such as ‘lesser quality’, ‘inferior quality’, and ‘awkwardness of the perspective’, and he even concludes that ‘Vanmour’s descriptive series of costume paintings belong to the genre of folk art as much as to that of scientific description,

73

Rijksmuseum, ‘Jaarverslag’, 35.

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and border on the category of tourist souvenirs’.74 These remarks expose an internal divide at the Rijksmuseum: for the museum’s history department, responsible for curating the exhibition, the collection presented a highly valued example of shared heritage, which was only enhanced by its connection to the multicultural society of the Netherlands, while to the Rijksmuseum’s art history department, the Vanmour paintings had documentary value first and foremost, though little artistic merit. In its dealings with the paintings, the Rijksmuseum had difficulty to see how the ‘lesser artistic quality’ of Vanmour’s oeuvre was precisely the result of the cultural encounter it aimed to foreground. None of the many Rijksmuseum publications on the subject positions the paintings in the context of transculturation. Rather, the museum either assesses them according to European artistic norms and finds them failing miserably or treats them as realistic portrayals of Ottoman society. As Bevilacqua and Pfeifer observe, ‘the emphasis on Vanmour as an on-site painter who delivered an unmediated image of Ottoman society, a selling point in his time and our own, has obscured an examination of his process and sources’.75 Curator Duncan Bull, for instance, readily assumed that Vanmour must have recruited his assistants among the Greek community versed in the painting of icons, ‘as representative figuration is contrary to the teachings of Islam’. Likewise, he blamed the awkward perspectives on local assistants hired by Vanmour and their unfamiliarity with ‘Western-European norms’, drawing very close to De Stuers’s remarks of one century earlier.76 These comments imply a simplified view of the interplay between religion and artistic production and an apparent lack of awareness of the existence of Ottoman genres of painting.77

From Ottoman Threat to Friendly Neighbour The Rijksmuseum’s discovery of the Vanmour paintings as valuable multicultural assets was preceded by the rising level of interest in them shown by other 74

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Duncan Bull, ‘The Artist’, in The Ambassador, the Sultan, and the Artist: An Audience in Istanbul, ed. Eveline Sint Nicolaas, Günsel Renda, and Duncan Bull (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2003), 18–31. Bevilacqua and Pfeifer, ‘Turquerie’, 84. Bull, ‘The Artist’, 21. One of the labels in the exhibition did refer to Ottoman art but incorrectly stated that Ottoman painting was confined to miniatures on parchment.

On the In-Betweenness of the Paintings of Jean Baptiste Vanmour at the Rijksmuseum

cultural institutions, partly impelled by similar demographic and geopolitical considerations. For much of the latter half of the twentieth century, the paintings languished in the storage rooms of the Rijksmuseum and were seldom exhibited. The late 1980s saw a surge of loan requests, and since then the works of Vanmour have been part of over thirty exhibitions. The sudden rise in demand and interest can be read in the context of the changing relations between Turkey and Western Europe. Turkey has been an applicant to accede to the European Union since 1987. Furthermore, the migration of guest workers had changed the demographics of a number of EU countries, with West Germany signing bilateral recruitment agreements with Turkey in 1961 and the Netherlands following suit in 1964. By the late 1980s there were significant Turkish communities in both countries, and it was clear that they were there to stay. These developments provided the backdrop against which exhibitions featuring Vanmour’s paintings took place. About half of these exhibitions were art historical in nature, such as retrospective exhibitions of Jean Baptiste Vanmour and his fellow Orientalists, and this kind of presentation typically took place in France or Turkey. The other half, predominantly organized in Germany or the Netherlands, focused on themes of cultural contact. Yet the way this trope was played out changed considerably over time. In 1955 several Vanmour paintings were shown in the exhibition Der Türkenlouis at the Badisches Landesmuseum in Karlsruhe, which celebrated the 300th birthday of Ludwig Wilhelm (Louis William) von Baden-Baden (1655–1707). Ludwig Wilhelm was a chief commander of the Imperial Army who is best known for his role in preventing the Ottoman armies from conquering parts of Europe; this earned him the sobriquet Türkenlouis (‘Turkish Louis’). In the context of that exhibition, scholars celebrated the margrave as ‘one of the greatest defendants of Christianity, the Occident, of Europe against the Turks’ and spoke openly of the Türkengefahr (‘Turkish danger’).78 By contrast, the tone of the exhibitions organized from the 1980s onward has been rather different. A recent analysis of representations of Turkish identities in history museums across Western Europe conducted by Christopher Whitehead and Gönül Bozoğlu draws attention to the recurrent presentation of Turkish people as ‘constitutive others’ for European identities.79 The displays examined in the

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Helmut Eckert. ‘Der Feldherr und Reichsfürst’, in Der Türkenlouis, ed. Ernst Petrasch and Eva Zimmermann (Karslruhe: Badisches Landesmuseum, 1955), 39–49. Christopher Whitehead and Gönül Bozoğlu, ‘Constitutive Others and the Management of Difference: Museum Representations of Turkish Identities’, in Museums, Mi-

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study, located in various countries, reveal the particular significance of the Turks for remembering and managing difference. Two historical moments make a frequent appearance: the arrival of Turkish guest workers from the 1960s onward in countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, and the Ottoman incursions into Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, culminating in the defeat of the Ottoman army near Vienna in 1683. The latter event is frequently displayed in the context of a larger ‘Ottoman threat’. In the examined museums, these moments serve as ‘constitution moments’, somehow being of crucial importance for the formation of identities. The period of the Ottoman incursions can be considered as pivotal for the consolidation of the notion of Europe, whereas the arrival of the guest workers is often related to self-constitution in relation to the accommodation and assimilation of the migrant Other in modernity.80 A third often-occurring theme is the utilization of Turkish people and cultures ‘to construct a kind of ideal cosmopolitanism associated with a hybridization of cultural identities and forms (e.g. cuisine) that characterize a beneficial Western-European multiculturalism’, i.e. to present a positive image of today’s multicultural societies.81 The exhibition history of the Vanmour paintings reveals a slightly different pattern, but one no less political in the ideas underpinning it. Starting with the momentous exhibition Europa und der Orient 800–1900 (Europe and the Orient 800–1900), held in Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau in 1989, the Vanmour paintings have been on display in over a dozen exhibitions on the subject of relationships between Europe and Turkey. The focus in these exhibitions has invariably been on conviviality and on Ottoman culture as a source of inspiration for European arts and cultures, with topics ranging from the Orient in Mozart’s music to turquerie, tulipmania, and influences on European ceramics. The curators of these exhibitions spoke of the need for rapprochement (Annäherung) and of deeply rooted prejudices they intended to overcome. Typical is the foreword to the catalogue of The Tulip: A Symbol of Two Nations (Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, Istanbul 1993), a Dutch initiative, containing a statement of Jan J. Jonker Roelants, president of the Turco-Dutch Friendship Association:

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gration and Identity in Europe: Peoples, Places and Identities, ed. Christopher Whitehead, Susannah Eckersley, Katherine Lloyd, and Rhiannon Mason (London: Routledge, 2015), 253–84. Whitehead and Bozoğlu, ‘Constitutive Others’, 267. Whitehead and Bozoğlu, ‘Constitutive Others’, 254.

On the In-Betweenness of the Paintings of Jean Baptiste Vanmour at the Rijksmuseum

The Turks and the Dutch seem to enjoy a special relationship based on more than 400 years of trade and 300 years of peaceful relations. Over the last few decades both countries have grown even closer together thanks to the existence of numerous international organisations, increasing bilateral ties, tourism and last but not least the presence of more than 200,000 people of Turkish origin in the Netherlands.82 In these exhibitions the Turkish-European encounter of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries is again taken as a constitutive moment, but now its interpretation has done a 180-degree turn, no longer being perceived as a threat but rather as a moment that gave birth to productive cross-cultural contact extending into the present. Within this framework, the Turkish people are redefined as the neighbours of Europeans. Although at the surface the exhibitions seem to address historical topics, they intend first and foremost to articulate a role for migrants from Turkey living within the multicultural societies in Germany and the Netherlands, compelling them to behave as friendly neighbours rather than aggressive enemies. Moreover, the frame of neighbours departs from the notion of communities as separate entities and, therefore, negates transculturality. Within these museum representations it implies otherness, a concept used to constitute identities through the management of difference.83 Thus, the frame of neighbours makes it clear that Turks cannot be—perhaps never will be—considered Europeans. While my analysis confirms most of the findings of Whitehead and Bozoğlu, there are also some dissimilarities; these can be explained by the difference between temporary exhibitions and permanent galleries, the latter heavily relying on museums’ own collections. In a number of history museums, particularly in Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Germany, this means the showcasing of Türkenbeute (or ‘Turkish loot’), which for a long time had been part of displays as evidence of the ‘Ottoman threat’. However, also Türkenbeute can be reinterpreted in a frame of conviviality, as the Badisches Landesmuseum shows. In 2019 it temporarily moved the objects, placing them in the exhibition Kaiser und Sultan: Nachbarn in Europas Mitte (Kaiser and Sultan: Neighbours in Central Europe) which ran from 2019 to 2020 and emphasized the ‘mutual fruitful exchange’ and the ‘civilizational innovations that emerged

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Michiel Roding, ed., The Tulip: A Symbol of Two Nations (Utrecht: M.Th. Houtsma Stichting; Istanbul: Turco-Dutch Friendship Association, 1993), 7. Whitehead and Bozoğlu, ‘Constitutive Others’.

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in the shadow of power politics and religious conflicts: innovations in architecture, art and fashion or the introduction of new technical processes’.84 The organizers of the exhibition made no secret about the present-day relevance of the exhibition: ‘with its political, economic, and religious wars, which resulted in broad flows of refugees and migrants, the seventeenth century is a mirror of our time: it provides links to today’s globalization with its increasingly intercultural societies and questions current stereotypes about Islam and the alleged strangers’.85 The Turkish migration of the twentieth century, another theme featuring heavily in the permanent displays, is also not a major theme in the temporary exhibitions to which the Vanmour paintings were loaned. Yet it definitely did play a role, as we can see, for example, in the Kaiser und Sultan exhibition announcement. In the late twentieth century, in countries with sizable Turkish populations, such as the Netherlands, museums started to adapt their collections to be able to represent these new citizens.86 Like the Vanmour retrospective at the Rijksmuseum in 2003, a number of exhibitions addressing topics related to Turkish culture and history were primarily organized to address a multicultural audience. These include Türkische Kunst und Kultur aus osmanischer Zeit (Turkish art and culture from the Ottoman period; Museum für Kunsthandwerk, Frankfurt 1985 and Villa Hügel, Essen 1985) and Istanbul: de stad en de sultan (Istanbul: The city and the sultan; De Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam 2006). The reinstatement of the Vanmour paintings at the Rijksmuseum must be considered in this context. Since the reopening of the Rijksmuseum in 2013, the Vanmour paintings are—once again—exhibited in a ‘Turkish cabinet’, which is located in the gallery of the eighteenth century.87 Thematically, the display contextualizes the works as part of the diplomatic relations between the Netherlands and the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, the introductory text panel evokes the trope of Turks-as-friendly-neighbours by describing the Ottoman Empire as ‘a cosmopolitan society’, providing a home for

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‘Kaiser und Sultan’ exhibition website, Badisches Landesmuseum, https://www.lan desmuseum.de/museum-im-schloss/sonderausstellungen/kaiser-und-sultan, accessed February 2021; as of January 2022 the website has moved to https://kaiserundsultan. landesmuseum.de/ and the text has since changed. Badisches Landesmuseum, ‘Kaiser und Sultan’. Mirjam Shatanawi, Islam at the Tropenmuseum (Arnhem: LM Publishers, 2014), 141. Sint Nicolaas, ‘From Sultan to Swindler’, 35.

On the In-Betweenness of the Paintings of Jean Baptiste Vanmour at the Rijksmuseum

Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Albanians, Bulgarians, Persians, and Western Europeans, and enjoying ‘a climate of tolerance, in which everyone was free to practise his or her own religion—as long as taxes were paid and civil peace was maintained’. Thus, in the Rijksmuseum too, the analogy with today’s culturally diverse societies is just around the corner. In more than one way, this can be interpreted as a return to the days of Cornelis Calkoen, when the Vanmour paintings were instruments of cultural diplomacy.

Conclusion In their afterlives as museum objects, the paintings made in Jean Baptiste Vanmour’s workshop have undergone different readings: as ethnographic material, as works of art, as proof of diplomatic success, and finally, as object lessons for the coexistence of German, Dutch, and Turkish citizens. Like other Rijksmuseum holdings from the Islamic world, the in-betweenness of the paintings made them elusive to continual attempts to classify them. The decidedly transcultural nature of the Vanmour paintings stands in sharp contrast with the persistence of the Rijksmuseum’s desire to approach them through the lens of European art and history. Moreover, the biography of the paintings reveals how established art historical narratives conflicted with the Rijksmuseum’s social ambitions. When status and prestige is derived from being affiliated with art as the highest form of human expression, it is difficult to abandon Eurocentric histories of interpretation. Could engagement with new audiences of Turkish heritage ever be fruitful when traces of transcultural contact noticeable in the art were readily dismissed and the Turkish contribution to the paintings disregarded? It raises the question: Can universal museums like the Rijksmuseum decolonize while staying anchored within the framework of ‘art’? And, likewise, can the Western museum decolonize and continue the dichotomous model—of ‘the West and the rest’—on which it was built? Recently, fellow universal museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum, have begun to revise the ‘outdated taxonomies’ they inherited from the nineteenth century.88 The question is whether, and 88

Venetia Porter and William Greenwood, ‘Displaying the Cultures of Islam at the British Museum: The Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World’, In Curating Islamic Art Worldwide: From Malacca to Manchester, ed. Jenny Norton-Wright (Cham: Springer

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when, the Rijksmuseum will follow suit. The task ahead is daunting, and it will require the museum to face complex epistemological challenges in order to ‘completely rethink, redo, and remake the museum’.89 The history of the Vanmour paintings reveals what is at stake to undo the museumscape’s hierarchy and the underpinning dichotomies of ‘Europe’ and ‘non-Europe’, ‘art’ and ‘ethnology’. It discloses how deeply rooted the current constellation is, but also how easily it is defied by the in-betweenness of museum holdings that represent a new globalized canon of art. In the end, the transculturality of the Vanmour paintings shows the way to what it truly means to be a global museum.

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Troelenberg, Eva-Maria. ‘Islamic Art and the Invention of the Masterpiece’. In Islamic Art and the Museum: Approaches to Art and Archaeology of the Muslim World in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Benoît Junod, Georges Khalil, Stefan Weber, and Gerhard Wolf, 183–88. London: Saqi Books, 2012. Vawda, Shahid. ‘Museums and the Epistemology of Injustice: From Colonialism to Decoloniality’. Museum International 71, nos. 1–2 (July 2019): 72–79. Watenpaugh, Heghnar Z. ‘Resonance and Circulation: The Category “Islamic Art and Architecture”’. In A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, edited by Finbarr Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu, 2:1223–44. Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2017. Welsch, Wolfgang. ‘Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today’. In Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, edited by Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash, 195–213. London: SAGE Publications, 1999. Whitehead, Christopher, and Gönül Bozoğlu. ‘Constitutive Others and the Management of Difference: Museum Representations of Turkish Identities’. In Museums, Migration and Identity in Europe: Peoples, Places and Identities, edited by Christopher Whitehead, Susannah Eckersley, Katherine Lloyd, and Rhiannon Mason, 253–84. London: Routledge, 2015.

Shameful Objects, Apologizing Subjects The False Memory Syndrome and Ultranationalism in the Politics of Representation in Macedonia Suzana Milevska

Monuments and museum collections often resonate as the most obvious symptoms of repressive sociopolitical and cultural structures, colonial or otherwise. They point to the heterogenic and hierarchical nature of collective memory and to the hierarchized and violent strategies of collecting cultural objects and artefacts. This text aims to deconstruct the historical background of the violence, whether visible or concealed, in memorials, monuments, and other statues in public spaces, or in the public collections of museums that aim towards celebration of national identity and preservation of collective memory. Almost always, representing and recalling certain traumatic events through problematic cultural objects—either public monuments or objects from public collections and museums—calls for ‘overwriting’ different, and often produces conflicting, historical narratives. Thus a questioning of the underlying political motivations and provenience of such objects, and sometimes their prompt relocation, restitution, return, or even destruction, takes place as a result of lack of collective consensus as to their relevance. This text attempts to draw attention to collective shame as agency by emphasizing, in Paul Gilroy’s terms, ‘the painful obligations to work through the grim details of imperial and colonial history.’1 It points to the important manifestation of various communities’ discontent with what has been defined as objects of cultural heritage on their behalf. By placing the concept of ‘productive shame’ in opposition to conservative over-identification with the past,

1

Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 99–100.

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collective productive shame is understood as the first step in what could ultimately lead towards advancing an affirmative multicultural and decolonized society where culture and art are not seen as isolated societal realms. My analysis and arguments focus mainly on a case study of the Macedonian government’s urbanist project Skopje 2014 and the public reactions and protests against it, dubbed the Colourful Revolution (figs. 1, 2).2

Fig. 1: Colourful Revolution 1, ‘paintballing’ of the refurbished building of the Government of Macedonia, Skopje, 1 May 2016.

 

2

The term ‘Colourful Revolution’ stands for the three-month-long protests that took place in Macedonia in 2016. The protestors targeted and shot paintballs at the monuments as symbols of the nationalist and corrupt local politicians. The protests ultimately led to the overturn of the right-wing and ultranationalist government that initiated and built the Skopje 2014 project.

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Fig. 2: Colourful Revolution 2, graffiti on Gate of Macedonia triumphal arch, Skopje, 1 May 2016.

Photographs by Sašo Stanojkoviќ.

The City as Museum and 3D Textbook Skopje 2014 was a government-run urbanist project that implanted ‘false memories’ in the place of the long-term ‘lack’ of historical consensus regarding the Macedonian national identity and language in the regional context; this was intended to bolster a weak national identity and propagate nonexistent collective memories of a non-existent grand past. Here I refer to ‘false memories’ as it is a well-known phenomenon from psychopathology denoting trauma-driven, imagined events that appear as real in the subject’s memory, but I interpret it in terms of organized interventions in the collective memory.3 3

According to some researchers there is no certain way to distinguish between true and false memories, but the concept of repression has, in any case, not been confirmed scientifically. Julia Shaw, ‘What Experts Wish You Knew about False Memories’, MIND

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Over several years (2010–2016), a series of figurative monuments appeared in the public spaces of the Republic of Macedonia’s capital of Skopje, and in several other Macedonian cities, all built within the framework of Skopje 2014. This problematic ultranationalist project and its ineptly cast memorials have significantly and irreparably affected the capital city’s silhouette, previously dominated by socialist-modernist, brutalist, and metabolist architecture. Most importantly, Skopje 2014 has affected macrohistorical narratives, particularly with the instalment of the statue Warrior on a Horse (a figure still known locally as ‘Alexander the Great’, despite objections from the Greek government), the Gate of Macedonia (a triumphal arch), and several equestrian statues of newly popularized heroes from the Ottoman past placed in the centre of Skopje (fig. 3).4

Fig. 3: Statue of Vasil Hristov Chekalarov (or Tcakalarov), 2013.

Photograph by Sašo Stanojkoviќ.

4

(blog), Scientific American, 8 August 2016, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-gu est-blog/what-experts-wish-you-knew-about-false-memories/. Suzana Milevska, ‘Ágalma: The “Objet Petit a,” Alexander the Great, and Other Excesses of Skopje 2014’, e-flux Journal 57 (September 2014), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/aga lma-the-objet-petit-a-alexander-the-great-and-other-excesses-of-skopje-2014/.

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The kitschy, overpriced monuments and memorials representing figures and events from the remote national past, some well known, some marginal, were supposed to enhance national sentiment and strengthen populist ultranationalistic identitarian politics during the ongoing conflict with the Greek government regarding the use of the name ‘Macedonia’. The public sculptures and administrative buildings prompted public ridicule as vulgar and were criticised for their obvious references to renowned Western aesthetic regimes—mere imitations of styles from periods atypical of the local architecture—transforming the city squares into theatrical-style backdrops, or memorial parks of ‘false memories’. Similar versions of the alternative past were extensively offered by the new Museum of the Macedonian Struggle, which focuses on revisionist representations of events relevant for the country’s fragile national identity. In a compensatory gesture, the museum representations reach back to antiquity, a time when the name ‘Macedonia’ was praised and revered. Official attempts to explain the purpose behind Skopje 2014 in the media were problematic and unconvincing to the public, and this ultimately led to frequent criticism by the oppositional parties and to public protests. For example, the mayor of Skopje was ridiculed when he tried to justify the project’s aim by claiming it was to function as a kind of 3D history textbook which would compensate for the city’s alleged lack of history books—a kind of pedagogical museum to supposedly represent and teach the forgotten grand past.5 I want to argue that although these new imageries aimed to represent certain traumatic events of loss and lack from the past, they can cause new traumas. They supposedly preserve and perpetuate memories, but sometimes they are completely new representations and, in a way, symptoms of various repressive sociopolitical and cultural structures and systemic strategies that aim to compete, erase, and overwrite the previously dominant historical narratives such as anti-fascism, modernism, and socialism. I take into account several relevant traumas that preceded and enabled Skopje 2014. For example, the Skopje earthquake (1963), the dissolution of Yugoslavia and declaration of the independent Republic of Macedonia (1990/1991), the start of the ongoing contestation of the country’s constitutional name (1993), the armed conflicts with ethnic Albanians (2001), the wiretapping scandal and associated political pardons (2015–2017), the storming 5

This contrasts sharply with Winston Churchill’s famous witticism that ‘the Balkan region generates more history than it can locally consume.’

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of the Parliament and the related violent attacks (2017), and the country’s long socioeconomic transition during the post-socialist period are, in my view, some of these traumas.6 In parallel, a political programme of relocation, reconfiguration, or even destruction of the monuments from previous epochs has intensified the rightwing government’s national cultural policy, while for some critics the project was motivated by covert neoliberal agendas that ultimately led to the support for erecting new statues. The equestrian statue of Vasil Hristov Chekalarov (or Tcakalarov) (fig. 3) is one of the most obvious examples of the contentiousness of these objects, both in visual terms and the historical terms that result from a shared past with Bulgaria and Greece.7 The aggressive posture of Chekalarov on a charging horse, leaning forward with a gun in his right hand in the moment of an assault, is difficult for other statuary to match in terms of represented violence. Hence the urgent need to deconstruct the invisible and visible violence which these newly erected objects have produced in the realms of the symbolic, imaginary, and ‘real’. By definition, a monument is something negative—marking absence, the past, death, and, above all, a certain loss. In Skopje 2014, the celebration of unrecognized and incomplete identities, marginal heroes, and exaggerated victories from history was used as a strategy for inducing collective enjoyment and, ultimately, self-delusion. But rather than analysing the stylistic and aesthetic aspects of such constructed objects, more insight might be gained from formulating a psychoanalytical interpretation of the ultranationalist cultural policy of the right-wing neoliberal elites. Rewriting history ‘becomes the ultimate jouissance’.8

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Suzana Milevska, ‘Monumentomachia: Citizens vs. Monuments as Participatory Institutional Critique’ (lecture, Program in Art, Culture and Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 27 September 2016). Vasil Hristov Chekalarov was born in 1874 in Smardesh, then part of the Ottoman Empire (now Krystallopigi, Florina, Greece) and died on 9 July 1913 in Belkamen (now Drosopigi). He was a revolutionary and one of the leaders of the Internal MacedonianAdrianople Revolutionary Organization in Aegean Macedonia. In both Macedonian and Bulgarian historiography he is celebrated as a hero who fought against the Ottomans, but it wasn’t before the equestrian statue of him was erected in 2013 that he became known to the general public in Macedonia. Jacques Lacan, quoted in Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2006), 129.

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According to Slavoj Žižek, the objet petit a relates to the lack, ‘the remainder of the real that sets in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation, a hole at the center of the symbolic order, the mere appearance of some secret to be explained, interpreted, etc.’9 When pro-government journalists and other supporters of Skopje 2014 praise the project for the quantity of its constructed objects (e.g. by populist politicians’ frequent statement ‘At least they built a lot’), Žižek’s explanation of the constitutive role of neoliberal enjoyment comes to mind. It is this paradox which defines surplus-enjoyment: it is not a surplus which simply attaches itself to some ‘normal’, fundamental enjoyment because enjoyment as such emerges only in this surplus, because it is constitutively an ‘excess’. If we subtract the surplus, we lose enjoyment itself, just as capitalism, which can survive only by incessantly revolutionizing its own material conditions, ceases to exist if it ‘stays the same’, if it achieves an internal balance. This, then, is the homology between surplus-value—the ‘cause’ which sets in motion the capitalist process of production—and surplus-enjoyment, the object-cause of desire.10 The iconoclastic radicality of such a ‘void’, a desiring machine that doesn’t produce anything except the absence or lack behind such an emptied-out representation of identity, illustrates the context of Macedonia and the politics of an identity-based inferiority complex caused by the traumas related to such a past. The sculptures of beggars, frivolous women with bare breasts (no female heroes were given a monumental representation in the frame of Skopje 2014), bulls, fish, dancers, and trees with anthropomorphic limbs were already installed in 2009, prior to the official start of Skopje 2014, and stood alongside militaristic historical figures, most of whom are on horseback and holding weapons. As capital investment flowed into such problematic projects, art and cultural institutions as well as valuable monuments and buildings from antiquity and the anti-fascist and socialist past were neglected and started to deteriorate. Due to the immense size and number of these new visual interventions, they have significantly, in a sort of rapid-rewind, transformed the visual culture and public space of this previously socialist-modernist city that had been rebuilt, after its catastrophic earthquake of 1963, around Kenzo

9 10

Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 185. Ibid.

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Tange’s metabolist architecture project based on two concepts: ‘City Wall’ and ‘City Gate’.11 The Skopje 2014 project consists of monuments dedicated to various events and figures from the country’s distant nationalist past, thus giving priority to some periods over others, and combined different styles for political reasons and without clear reference to some architecturally eclectic programme. For example, neoclassical makeovers were heavily criticised for adding ‘antiquized’ columns to unique examples of late-modernist, brutalist, and metabolist architecture without respecting them for their specific value—for what could be interpreted as ‘late modernism’ or ‘critical regionalist architecture’. New office buildings for the growing number of public administration employees were also financed and erected seemingly overnight, in a similarly retro ‘neoclassical’ style.

11

Tange won the international UNESCO-supported open competition for urban reconstruction in solidarity with the destroyed Skopje. This was one of the earliest and rare experimental examples of metabolist architecture, but unfortunately most of the project’s archive was significantly damaged in a recent fire. See Damjan Kokalevski, ‘Skopje’s History on Fire’, e-flux Architecture, 10 May 2017, http://www.e-flux.com/anno uncements/132731/skopje-s-history-on-fire/.

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Fig. 4: Diagram of Michael Rothberg’s concept of ‘multidirectional memories’.

  Michael Rothberg: ‘From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory’, Criticism 53, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 525.

The systematic strategy of overwriting the previously dominant historical narratives such as anti-fascism, modernism, and socialism creates a void: an organized amnesia that turns their memory into a ‘foreign country’.12 For a multicultural society such as contemporary Macedonia, the concept of multidirectional memory, as discussed in a number of books and texts by Michael Rothberg,13 could be a much more appropriate way for the city to engage with its past (fig. 4). Rothberg has made a case arguing against a competition that compares negative memories and grievances that set victims against each other. He writes:

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David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–25. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Michael Rothberg, ‘Remembering Back: Cultural Memory, Colonial Legacies and Postcolonial Studies’, in The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham Huggan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 359–79.

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While that endemic conflict plays a significant role in my analysis, my aim is a more general mapping of the range of forms that public memory can take in politically charged situations. By mapping that discursive field, I arrive at a four-part distinction in which multidirectional memories are located at the intersection of an axis of comparison (defined by a continuum stretching from equation to differentiation) and an axis of political affect (defined by a continuum stretching from solidarity to competition—two complex, composite affects).14 Although schematic, in Rothberg’s own words, this concept offers an orientation map that can provide us with a basic understanding of the intersections between different political imaginaries in an age of ‘transcultural memory’.15 Antagonistic logic, imprecise generalizations, equations, and symmetries, and dichotomic or hierarchical analogies have often appeared in competitive comparisons found even in the most profound writings, including, for example, texts about decoloniality, black pessimism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Holocaust and other genocides. This has led Rothberg to call for a ‘differentiated solidarity’ and to argue that ‘a radically democratic politics of memory needs to include a differentiated empirical history, moral solidarity with victims of diverse injustices, and an ethics of comparison that coordinates the asymmetrical claims of those victims.’16 Acknowledging being influenced by W. E. B. Du Bois’s reflections on the Holocaust and the possible comparisons between different atrocities, Rothberg issued an important warning about any ultimate victimhood: ‘Working through the implications and particularities of genocides needs to be separated from a discursive sacralization of the Holocaust that legitimates a politics of absolutism.’17 This warning is particularly relevant for discussion of memorials dedicated to the Holocaust, to its counter-monuments, and to issues of representation in art of the Holocaust or other genocides.

14 15

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Michael Rothberg, ‘From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory’, Criticism 53, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 525. For a visual ‘map’ of Rothberg’s ideas, see the diagram published in Suzana Milevska, ‘On Productive Shame: Triangulations of Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency’, introduction to On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 22. Rothberg, ‘From Gaza to Warsaw’, 526. Rothberg, ‘From Gaza to Warsaw’, 540.

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Although the expensive objects produced by Skopje 2014 are creatively and aesthetically worthless, they do, nonetheless, carry significant meaning: they become the empty signifiers of the sought-after identity that can complete Macedonia’s incomplete contemporary identity.

False Memories and Traumas: Against Organized Amnesia and Implanted False Memories in Public Space Skopje’s abundance of monuments and public sculptures can be seen as an attempt to use ultranationalism to compensate for the incomplete and faulty national identity of the ‘rogue’ state: an outlaw nation which is not complying with the international laws accepted by most other states.18 The reason for the frequent interpretations of Skopje 2014 as compensation for the alleged lack of ‘appropriate’ visible cultural past as part of Europe’s history is more evident in the construction of a completely new triumphal arch (fig. 2) and in the addition of other historical stylistic elements that are locally atypical, such as neoclassical columns and pseudo-baroque ornaments, to existing socialist-modernist architectural objects. After the dissolution of Yugoslavia, Macedonia—one of the first successor states to proclaim independence in 1991—began experiencing problems with its neighbour Greece. The main source of conflict emerged when the first post-Yugoslavian government in Macedonia in 1991 decided to retain its Yugoslavian name, the ‘Republic of Macedonia’. The territory and culture of the ancient kingdom of Macedonia, however, does not completely fall within either contemporary Greece or Macedonia. In 1993, under pressure from the Greek government, the UN officially designated Macedonia as ‘the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’. This was later replaced by the unrecognizable acronym ‘FYROM’19 As a result of the naming conflicts, the country has not been admitted into the EU, NATO, and other international institutions and organizations. In this relative isolation, the rule of law started to deteriorate, with the local government continuing to subvert democratic rules and

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Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 97. For an extensive timeline and extrapolation of the political arguments regarding the ‘name issue’, see Zlatko Kovach, ‘Macedonia: Reaching Out to Win L. American Hearts’, Scoop World, 26 February 2008. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0802/S00363.htm.

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laws while justifying its unlawful decisions through an unofficial ‘state of exception’: the status of not having an internationally recognized name became an excuse for anything, although the country was gradually accepted as the Republic of Macedonia by approximately 150 states (this has given certain legitimacy to the state, although it has been kept outside the EU).20 What is lacking or erased, emptied out, or renamed follows the obvious strategy of omitting from public spaces visual representations of women’s social role. Used instead, as a ‘supplement’, are pregnant or objectified and eroticized representations of women that support patriarchy as the prevailing structural and systemic societal pattern. During the first stage of Skopje 2014, there were no monuments dedicated to minority historical figures, and only a few statues of women, which even in such a patriarchal context was surprising. Even these few female statues are problematic: Olympias, for example, the mother of Alexander the Great, appears in a group monument dedicated to Philip, his father, in a fashion that fulfils the explicitly conservative visual regime of representations of the female body presented only as a pregnant woman, a mother and caregiver. It was therefore only a question of when such deficiencies would ignite the discontent and would turn it into a public revolt (fig. 5).21 As if the militant and masculinized imagery, the already-existing tensions with Greece over the naming dispute, and the problematic claiming of a Hellenic history were not causing enough troubles during the continuously deferred negotiations regarding the country’s EU membership, the former minister of foreign affairs Antonio Milošoski stated (in a 2010 interview with the Guardian) that Warrior on a Horse was a way of raising the middle finger to the Greek government, or ‘saying [up yours] to them’!22

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Finally, in 2019 a political agreement was reached, and the name North Macedonia was accepted by both governments. The ruling coalition that has been in power since 2008 is formed of two major right-wing parties: the VMRO-DPMNE (consisting primarily of officials of ChristianMacedonian descent) and the DUI (consisting primarily of officials from the MuslimAlbanian minority). Later this statement was amended and retracted because it caused an embarrassing diplomatic scandal. See Helena Smith, ‘Macedonian Statue: Alexander the Great or a Warrior on a Horse?’ Guardian, 14 August 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/world/201 1/aug/14/alexander-great-macedonia-warrior-horse.

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Fig. 5: Monument to Philip II, Olympias Sculpture Group.

Photograph by Sašo Stanojkoviќ.

Reinforcing the concept of the nation-state and national identity didn’t help the country’s stability, however, since the Republic of Macedonia was founded on precisely the same mistrust between different nations on the outside as hierarchical differentiations between different nationalities on the inside. Skopje 2014 was criticized for excluding from its major narrative all other ethnicities but Macedonian. Etienne Balibar and many others have already broadly critiqued modern conceptions of the nation-state and looked at uncertainties around the historical realities of the nation in general.23 Balibar specifically contends that it is impossible to pinpoint the beginning of a nation, or to argue that the people who inhabit a nation-state are the descendants of the nation that preceded it. Because no nation-state has an ethnic base, according to Balibar, every nation-state creates fictional ethnicities in order to project stability, and perhaps there has been no more obvious case of this in recent European history than the Skopje 2014 project. These artificially stable identities are produced because the greatest threats to national identity are the different identities that pre-existed more 23

Etienne Balibar, ‘The Nation Form: History and Ideology’, trans. Immanuel Wallerstein and Chris Turner, Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 13, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 329.

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recent waves of immigration and thus preceded the rapid amalgamations of ethnicities, religions, and newly defined political subjectivities. As Balibar puts it, ‘the idea of nations without a state, or nations “before” the state, is thus a contradiction in terms, because a state is always implied in the historic framework of a national formation even if not necessarily within the limits of its territory.’24 This becomes the ultimate truth of the political reasoning behind the government’s populist posturing, as was profoundly discussed by Ernesto Laclau in his On Populist Reason: ‘But the presence of the Real within the Symbolic involves unevenness: objets petit a presuppose a differential cathexis, and it is this cathexis that we call affect.’25 By contesting the country’s constitutional name and postponing the resolution of the ‘name issue’, in Macedonia both the ‘state of exception’ and the ‘rogue state’ created a long-term vacuum, a production of false truths regarding identity, and, ultimately, a state legitimacy crisis.26 Here I refer to the concept ‘rogue states’, as discussed by Derrida, and ‘states of exception’, as theorized by Giorgio Agamben. The difference between the two derives from two different interpretations of the ‘force of law’. The concept of a ‘rogue state’ deals with the possibility that one state, citing international standards, declares another state unlawful and intervenes in its internal affairs. In the case of Macedonia this was perpetuated by denying it recognition under its chosen constitutional name. The concept of ‘states of exception’, on the other hand, has more to do with the declaration by a sovereign power that internal conditions have gone so far beyond the possibility of governing according to constitutional law that exceptional rules need to be applied, and thus a ‘state of exception’ be officially declared.27

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Balibar, ‘Nation Form’, 331, 351. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 118–19. For a complex discussion of names, empty signifiers, and populist rule, see Laclau’s chapter entitled ‘The People and the Production of Emptiness’, 67–124. See Viktor Shklovsky’s parable about historical monuments in post-revolutionary Russia functioning ‘as a strange alibi for not telling the whole truth’ or even ‘a quarter of the truth’. Viktor Shklovsky, The Knight’s Move (1919–1921), written in Petrograd, Moscow, and Berlin, quoted in Svetlana Boym, ‘Tatlin, or, Ruinophilia’, Cabinet 28 (Winter 2007/2008), http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/28/boym2.php. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 23.

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Productive Shame as Agency The concept of ‘productive shame’ runs through my long-term cross-disciplinary research, which has included examinations of artistic projects and activist initiatives that question and criticize sociopolitical, juridical, and other systemic structures for enabling and maintaining difficult cultural heritages without critically addressing their problematic background. Within the framework of contentious cultural heritage, one can exemplify and interpret events, subjects, names, art, architecture, images, or signs that have often been suppressed, forgotten, or even intentionally marginalized because they conceal certain shameful deeds or wrongdoings of the past. More importantly, these elements also allow a continuity of problematic legacies in present times, both in denotative and connotative terms. The main assumption of this essay is not only that artistic research projects could reveal more or less evident stereotypical racialized representations of different proveniences, but that they might also prompt an acknowledging or admitting of guilt and responsibility for past wrongdoings. This section deals with challenging the capacity of subjects and collectives to be ashamed and to break with the continuity of institutionalized nationalist discourses through apology, together with the changing of systemic structures that have long enabled the continuity of racist and ethnic hatred, as well as racial discrimination against people of colour, anti-Semitism, antiRomaism, etc. It also stresses the urgency of addressing these prejudices particularly when they are embedded and celebrated as cultural heritage. The complex implications of the creation, display, and circulation of shameful objects, mainly stored in museum storage and private collections but sometimes exhibited in different topical or academic research exhibitions and public spaces, as in the case of the Skopje 2014 project, are manifold and difficult to fully apprehend. Who should carry the guilt for the existence of such objects is even less relevant than the question of how it is possible that such objects are still commissioned and circulated: Who needs their replication and may ‘enjoy’ looking at them? Shame usually implies something negative: in psychology it has been linked mainly to personal traumatic experiences of loss, absence or lack. Shame stands as a word both for vulnerability through exposure and for

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trying to conceal shameful parts.28 The term is thus inevitably related to representation and the gaze of the other. Furthermore, the complex concept of ‘productive shame’ was proposed by Paul Gilroy in Postcolonial Melancholia for the complex processes of coming to terms with ‘a grim colonial and imperial past.’29 Gilroy was profoundly invested in the question of how ‘to transform paralyzing guilt into a more productive shame that would be conducive to the building of a multicultural nationality that is no longer phobic about the prospect of exposure to either strangers or otherness.’30 Shame is particularly relevant for addressing the questions: • •

How can one deal with the personal and collective memories of ‘paralyzing guilt’ in the wake of dreadful atrocities and genocides? How can such negative experiences be transformed into ‘productive shame’ (not only by the perpetrators, but also by the victims, witnesses and the people who only indirectly received the circulated stories)?

Through entrusting shame with certain affirmative features, as Gilroy does, this concept may comprise the potential for overcoming collective affects of guilt.

Narration and Representation: Macrohistory vs. Microhistories; Symbolic and Ideological Patterns A story, to be a story, has to be told. There are specific generic structures that are detachable from the narrative material (words, texts, documents) of a story as well. Each of these forms follows a distinct transformational structure that emerges out of crisis. A microhistory, to be a microhistory, has to be recorded, written, told, depicted, etc. In its telling, a story also has to be told from a particular perspective. Similarly, the point of view of a microhistory does not depend on objectivity; on the contrary, it acknowledges that the narrator is profoundly implicated. Microhistory originally developed in Italy in the 1970s and, according to Giovanni Levi, one of the pioneers of the approach,

28 29 30

Sara Ahmed, ‘The Politics of Bad Feeling’, Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal 1, no. 1 (2005): 76. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, 99. Ibid.

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it began as a reaction to the crisis in the historiographical approaches of that period. Carlo Ginzburg, another of microhistory’s founders, has written that he first heard the term used around 1977, and soon afterwards he began to work with Levi and Simona Cerutti on Microstorie, a series of microhistorical works.31 I want to argue that microhistories and macrohistories are inextricably intertwined and hence have a major role in the construction of identity and subjectivity that cannot satisfactorily be accounted for by separating ‘intrinsic’ from ‘extrinsic’ attributes. The internalization of macrohistory on an individual level and, conversely, the striving towards self-insertion and self-fabulation into an official history, are examples of procedures that challenge linear history and any historical account of events from the past. If national and state history, in contrast to microhistory, does not necessarily take into account microscopic issues in individual accounts of various destinies and biographies, it turns into a fragmentary, ideologized, and irrelevant narrative. In its search for a method that can extrapolate reality and transform it into a logical list of details and events or, conversely, by collecting invented facts in the search for the best way of simulating the ‘reality’ of the non-existent person, self-fabulation becomes an imaginary and symbolic phenomenon that resembles the multi-personality syndrome that resembles, though should be distinguished from, the psychoanalytical multi-personality disorder.32

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The term ‘microhistory’ dates back to 1959, when the American historian George R. Stewart published a story about the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Pickett’s Charge: A Microhistory of the Final Attack on Gettysburg, July 3, 1863. Although this term resonates with the Annales School of history, for one of its leading historians, Fernand Braudel, this concept had negative connotations, being overly concerned with the history of events. For Luis González’s 1968 work Pueblo en vilo: Microhistoria de San José de Gracia, it’s important to distinguish between microhistory, for him synonymous with local history, and ‘petite histoire’, which is primarily concerned with anecdotes. Daniel C. Dennett, ‘The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity’ [1983], in Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, ed. Frank S. Kessel, Paula M. Cole, and Dale L. Johnson (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1992).

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Fig. 6: ‘Learning from the City’, video documentary, 2012. Video still.

Courtesy of the project organizers.

Recently there have been many attempts to address the question of the potential of microhistories to disrupt and dismantle the monolithic and hegemonic discourse of macrohistories. In recent discussions about identity politics, subject construction, and subjectivity, the intertwining processes of micropolitics and macropolitics have been neglected. In this context of a belated Macedonian grand narrative regarding nation-building, there is a particular relevance in the research of microhistories for the construction of subjectivity in the troubled post-socialist, transitional, and neoliberal geopolitical context. This was at the core of the research project Learning from the City (2013–2016) (fig. 6). This project, realized by a group of young Skopje architects, focused on several ‘little big stories’ of Skopje citizens who inhabit the residential buildings near the city’s main square—the main space contaminated by the visual narrative of Skopje 2014.33 Their research resulted in a variety of sketches, 33

The architecture research collective Learning from the City was initiated in 2012, and its first project was launched in 2013 during the 2nd Former West Congress, at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. The collective’s members, Aleksandar Baldazarski, Mila

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drawings, collective presentations, workshops, and a collage of several video interviews. The video documentary produced new micronarratives and counternarratives. It functions as a kind of visual and oral history that reveals many details of changes in everyday practice in the lives of families living next to the monuments, lives that were originally omitted or rendered invisible in the grand narrative of both ‘master plans’: Tange’s and Skopje 2014’s.

Monumentomachia: The Colourful Revolution as a Participatory Institutional Critique of Cultural Heritage Policy in Macedonia ‘Colourful Revolution’ is the name used to describe the protests in the Republic of Macedonia in spring 2016. Information about these three months of protests and paintball interventions targeting new government-erected monuments went viral, and news of the protests was widely spread across international social media and networks. Macedonia thus made it for the first time onto the map of international Occupy movements, and the spring protests turned into the biggest visual colourful interventions in the public space in the region of South Eastern Europe (figs. 1, 2).34 The events of the Colourful Revolution revealed the potential of ‘participatory institutional critique’ as a collective attempt to create distance from official policy and to reclaim the public space, as well as proved the need for citizens to fight for the right to participate in decision-making and reclaim violated and appropriated commons of public interest. However, it should be stressed that the protests were not triggered solely by the Skopje 2014 project but were actually prompted by the aftermath of a wiretapping scandal that revealed the government had wiretapped more than 20,000 people. Some of the recordings were leaked to the media, revealing the long-suspected corruption and organized crimes of various politicians; these recordings were publicly broadcast in front of the parliament building. The last straw that

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Dimitrovska, Darko Krstevski, Anastasija Spasovska, and Gordan Vitevski, were coordinated by and received organizational support from the NGO Freedom Square, in Skopje, and from Ivana Dragšik. Guy De Launey, ‘Protesters in Macedonia Stage “Colourful Revolution”’, BBC News, 2 June 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-36440895; Kristina Ozimec, ‘Macedonia: “Colorful Revolution” Paints Raucous Rainbow’, Deutsche Welle, 21 April 2016, http://www.dw.com/en/macedonia-colorful-revolution-paints-raucous-rainbow/ a-19203365.

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prompted these demonstrations was the announcement by Macedonia’s President Gjorge Ivanov of his decision to pardon approximately sixty politicians either charged with or under investigation for criminal activity.35 President Ivanov has been accused of teaming up with the ruling VMRO-DPMNE party to protect party officials from facing any trial or prosecution.36 Nevertheless, the revolt against the organized amnesia that led to the countermovements and protests, mainly against the government, was also a revolt against the preposterous violation of visual culture in Macedonia. The Colourful Revolution and its ‘colourful commandos’ simultaneously opened many paths for discursive debates, both in political activist circles and in the local art scene, around the issues of activist and protest art, the political results of such creative actions, and whether these actions are vandalism or art.37 Although the protests caused neither an immediate collapse of the government nor a reversal of the government’s position towards the common urban space, they did create a social awareness about the relevance of the commons, which both the old state-controlled socialist agendas as well as the newer neoliberal ones had failed to recognize. Eventually, this led to postponement of the elections and, ultimately, to the ruling government’s electoral upset in 2017. The protestors thus combined their concrete political demands for President Ivanov’s decision about the pardons to be revoked and for the elections originally planned for 5 June to be postponed (in both cases, their demands were met) with a severe critique of the megalomaniacal and wasteful neoliberal and nationalist cultural policy, but without concrete demands for removing the monuments. They argued that Skopje 2014 was ultimately built at the

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One can still access online the illegally recorded and transcribed conversations of the Macedonian political leaders; the release of these recordings caused the biggest ever political wire-tapping scandal in the country, dubbed ‘Bombs’: http://vistinomer.mk/s ite-prislushuvani-razgovori-objaveni-od-opozitsijata-video-audio-transkripti/(in Macedonian with no English subtitles) (accessed 19 March 2021). The protests first took place on 12 April, mainly in the central square of Skopje, but later spread throughout Macedonia to cities such as Bitola, Kumanovo, and Štip. One reporter wrote of it: ‘Macedonia: Bright colors are everywhere in downtown Skopje’; see Ozimec, ‘Macedonia: “Colorful Revolution”’. For example, the event ‘Art Activism and Agonistic Spaces—Does Creative Resistance Enable the Right to the City?’ on 9 June 2016, organized by the Skopje-based NGOs Kontrapunkt (Контрапункт) and Esperanza (Есперанца) in the pop-up Mobile Gallery in the City Park, Skopje.

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expense of the social and economic stability of the population that already struggled with very high rates of unemployment and poverty.38 Therefore, despite their initially political motivation, the protests resulted in the most unexpected outcome: they challenged the understanding and interpretation of the phenomenon and achievements of Skopje 2014 in visual, creative, and aesthetic terms. After all, it was the Skopje 2014 objects that became the main physical targets of these protests. One of the most archetypical of all the monuments built as part of this mega-celebration of failed, impotent diplomacy is the triumphal arch titled the Gate of Macedonia. Usually, a triumphal arch is intended to both memorialize a nation’s past victorious event and to anticipate and celebrate future victorious events. It is a monument type that supposedly has the power to collapse the time before and after the event that it celebrates; in a way, it consists of an open-ended multitude of events—a list that can be endlessly rewritten. Some of the graffiti on the Gate of Macedonia, for example, were critical remarks that referred directly to the appearance and execution of the targeted monuments. One example of graffiti on it read: ‘your arch is ugly’ in Macedonian slang (‘ružna vi e portata’). At least ever since Vladimir Tatlin challenged both the ‘bourgeois’ Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty with his tower Monument to the Third International (1919–1920), which was never constructed, discourse on monuments has changed back and forth. Recently, a style of negative definitions has flourished, such as ‘anti-monuments’, ‘counter-monuments’, ‘low-budget monuments’, ‘invisible monuments’, ‘monuments in waiting’, and ‘participatory monuments’.39 The Colourful Revolution could be interpreted as a participatory counter-monument. When several of these monuments were given the official status of objects of ‘cultural heritage’ in 2015, this decision was not made on any clear

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‘The colors are our answer against the greyness that this government has been pushing for years’, said the economist Branimir Jovanović to Deutsche Welle. He continued: ‘They dictated greyness; we give them color back. They forced uniformity; we give back variety.’ Ozimec, ‘Macedonia: “Colorful Revolution”’. Esther Shalev-Gerz, ed., The Contemporary Art of Trusting Uncertainties and Unfolding Dialogues (Stockholm: Art and Theory, 2013); James E. Young, ‘Spaces for Deep Memory: Esther Shalev-Gerz and the First Counter-Monuments’, in Esther Shalev-Gerz, Contemporary Art of Trusting Uncertainties, 89–97; James E. Young, ‘The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today’, Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992): 267–96.

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legislative basis or poll of public opinion.40 Skopje 2014 has been criticized for ultranationalism because it lacks representation of many ethnicities, and for its predominance of militant and masculine figures. The rare statues of women—for example, those of Olympias in the group monument dedicated to Philip II, which show her in several different poses but always limited by her ‘maternal’ and ‘patriarchal’ limitations: either pregnant or holding her son, Alexander the Great, in different stages of infancy—only serve to re-emphasize the patriarchal values and nationalist focus of the entire project’s concept, as well as the government’s designation of claiming a Hellenic past as a critical part of the national identity (fig. 5). The debates around Skopje 2014 highlighted by the Colourful Revolution inspired me to propose that this phenomenon should be dubbed ‘monumentomachia’, an ironic term which resonates with the history of ancient art and the decorative plastic arts of Hellenic temples: it would refer to the historic ‘heroic battle’ of people against the contentious monuments declared as being cultural heritage.41 In addition, the public discussions questioning whether the results of the Colourful Revolution could be interpreted as protest art provoked me to go even further, to state that this phenomenon introduced a new articulation of the renowned and already internalized and appropriated concept of institutional critique: a kind of participatory multidirectional critique aiming to criticize the centralized state cultural policy regarding a contentious national and cultural heritage, as in contrast to the usual nature of institutional critique in the arts, which is based on individual or group artistic practices (figs. 7, 8, 9).42

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Throwing paint and stones at and writing political slogans over the figurative historical monuments, memorials, and other parts of the Skopje 2014 project were also interpreted as violence, and the protestors were treated as hooligans. Some of the leaders of the protests (such as Zdravko Saveski, the leader of the LEFT party) were placed under temporary house arrest and put on trial for destroying valuable cultural heritage. Suzana Milevska, ‘Colourful Revolution as Monumentomachia’, TRACES project website, Politecnico di Milano, 16 October 2016, http://www.traces.polimi.it/index.html@p =1613.html On 12 May 2018, on the second anniversary of the first protests of the Colourful Revolution, the Macedonian artist Sašo Stanojkovik submitted an official petition to the Ministry of Culture of Macedonia and its Cultural Heritage Protection Office, calling for protection of the Colourful Revolution’s interventions and for declaring them ‘cultural heritage’ without a general consensus of the Macedonian citizens. The initiative was an ironic comment on the fact that these public performances of collective revolt and

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Fig. 7: Sašo Stanojkoviќ, ‘What’s Left of the Colourful Revolution’, 2018. An archive of the last traces and remnants of the Colourful Revolution in 2016: the splatters on ten paintballed monuments and buildings.

Unfortunately, the new social initiatives turned very fragile and failed in their fight against the carefully crafted conservative and neoliberal interest groups that misrepresented their advances into the public territory as representing common social interests. The results of the colourful interventions in spring 2016 are no longer visible, and there is almost nothing to remind citizens and visitors of the great battle: a kind of counter-monument, or at least a plaque, dedicated to the protests might be needed, but this would be in the realm of macrohistories or a self-insertion into grand historic narratives (fig. 7).43

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discontent by the citizens were, just like the modernist buildings that received fake neoclassical façades, not protected. See Hélène Cixous’s memorable statement ‘Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement’ in Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ [1975], in Feminism: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, trans. Leith Cohen and Paula Cohen (Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1997), 347.

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Fig. 8: Sašo Stanojkoviќ, ‘Let Them Eat Monuments’, 2014. Participatory project with a chocolate multiple of ’‘Warrior on a Horse’. Presented in the framework of the workshop Participatory Monuments, with Chto Delat, Face to Face with the Monument, Schwarzenbergplatz, Wiener Festwochen, Vienna.

Courtesy of Sašo Stanojkoviќ.

The violence of the Skopje 2014 project continues to take place not only in the visual field but also beyond aesthetic debates. Initially it was an intolerable attack on the notions of democracy, visual culture, perception, and citizen participation. Though frustrating, it also raised citizens’ awareness of the importance to fight for the right to participate in decisions on how the public space should be shaped. Although the Skopje 2014 project was imagined as a patriotic response to the ‘name issue’ and as a defence of the political questioning of the links to the contemporary ‘Macedonian’ national identity, the Prespa Agreement on the change of the country’s name to ‘North Macedonia’ (2019) quoted the Skopje 2014 project and its monuments as issues that partially provoked the need for a name change. The monuments that remain in public view have become a reminder of the abuse of power and of the paradoxical justification behind this huge urban intervention that continues to produce collective shame and attempts to overcome and rethink this episode from the recent past.

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Fig. 9: Sašo Stanojkoviќ, ‘Let Them Eat Monuments’, 2014. Chocolate multiple (edition of ten).

Courtesy of Sašo Stanojkoviќ.

Acknowledgement This essay was developed during Suzana Milevska’s engagement as a Principal Investigator at the Horizon 2020 project TRACES, Politecnico di Milano. An earlier version of appeared as ‘Ágalma: The “Objet Petit a,” Alexander the Great, and Other Excesses of Skopje 2014’ in e-flux Journal 57 (September 2014).

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Ahmed, Sara. ‘The Politics of Bad Feeling’. Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal 1, no. 1 (2005): 72–85. Balibar, Etienne. ‘The Nation Form: History and Ideology’. Translated by Immanuel Wallerstein and Chris Turner. Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 13, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 329–61. Boym, Svetlana. ‘Tatlin, or, Ruinophilia’. Cabinet 28 (Winter 2007/2008). http: //www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/28/boym2.php.

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Cixous, Hélène. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ [1975]. In Feminism: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, translated by Leith Cohen and Paula Cohen, 347–62. Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1997. De Launey, Guy. ‘Protesters in Macedonia Stage “Colourful Revolution”’. BBC, 2 June 2016. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-36440895. Dennett, Daniel C. ‘The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity’ [1983]. In Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, edited by Frank S. Kessel, Pamela M. Cole, and Dale L. Johnson. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 2006. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Kokalevski, Damjan. ‘Skopje’s History on Fire’. e-flux Architecture, 10 May 2017. http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/132731/skopje-s-history-on -fire/. Kovach, Zlatko. ‘Macedonia: Reaching Out to Win L. American Hearts’. Scoop World, 26 February 2008. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0802/S003 63.htm. Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. London: Verso, 2005. Lowenthal, David. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Milevska, Suzana. ‘Ágalma: The “Objet Petit a,” Alexander the Great, and Other Excesses of Skopje 2014’, e-flux Journal 57 (September 2014). http://www.e-flux.com/journal/agalma-the-objet-petit-a-alexande r-the-great-and-other-excesses-of-skopje-2014/. Milevska, Suzana. ‘Monumentomachia: Citizens vs. Monuments as Participatory Institutional Critique’. Lecture presented at the Program in Art, Culture and Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 27 September 2016. Milevska, Suzana. ‘On Productive Shame: Triangulations of Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency’, introduction to On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016. Nora, Pierre. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’. Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–25.

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Ozimec, Kristina. ‘Macedonia: “Colorful Revolution” Paints Raucous Rainbow’. Deutsche Welle, 21 April 2016. http://www.dw.com/en/macedonia-co lorful-revolution-paints-raucous-rainbow/a-19203365. Rothberg, Michael. ‘From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory’. Criticism 53, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 523–48. Rothberg, Michael. ‘Remembering Back: Cultural Memory, Colonial Legacies and Postcolonial Studies’. In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, edited by Graham Huggan, 359–79. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Shalev-Gerz, Esther, ed. The Contemporary Art of Trusting Uncertainties and Unfolding Dialogues. Stockholm: Art and Theory, 2013. Shaw, Julia. ‘What Experts Wish You Knew about False Memories’. MIND (blog), Scientific American, 8 August 2016. http://blogs.scientificamerican. com/mind-guest-blog/what-experts-wish-you-knew-about-false-memor ies/. Smith, Helena. ‘Macedonian Statue: Alexander the Great or a Warrior on a Horse?’. Guardian, 14 August 2011. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2 011/aug/14/alexander-great-macedonia-warrior-horse. Young, James E. ‘Spaces for Deep Memory: Esther Shalev-Gerz and the First Counter-Monuments’. In The Contemporary Art of Trusting Uncertainties and Unfolding Dialogues, edited by Esther Shalev-Gerz, 89–97. Stockholm: Art and Theory, 2013. Young, James E. ‘The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today’. Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992): 267–96. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1989.

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Towards a Cosmopolitical Exhibition Practice An Analysis of Place-Based Exhibitions Seeking to Engage with Cross-Cultural Encounters in Australian Museums1 Andrea Witcomb In his book The Metamorphosis of the World, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck2 sought to explain the current and increasingly complex political situation regarding the massive worldwide movement of people by identifying the tension between what he called a cosmopolitan ethic and cosmopolitics. Noting that the idea of the nation-state was under increasing pressure from globalization, including the transnational movements of people and goods, and that populist movements against these transnational forces were increasing, Beck sought to explain the situation by arguing that the world has become a cosmopolitized space. This is a space in which global others are in ‘our space’ and we in theirs, often as the result of unequal relations of power in which people migrate for jobs, escape war zones, or flee the effects of climate change, for example. At the same time, living conditions in what he termed the ‘poor regions of the world’ are not disconnected, he argued, from histories of colonialism and empire-building or their modern equivalents in global trade and labour relations. Beck then contrasted this sociological explanation for the increasing diversity of hitherto relatively homogeneous states with cosmopolitan modes of thought. As a normative idea, he explained, cosmopolitanism and its attendant human rights discourse, which asserts that everyone has a right to

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The research for this chapter was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant (DP120100594) titled Collecting Institutions: Cultural Diversity and the Making of Citizenship in Australia since the 1970s. Ulrich Beck, The Metamorphosis of the World (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016).

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strive for equality, is itself a response to the pressures that have emerged out of the development of a cosmopolitized world which has led to poorer countries’ citizens wanting the same rights and opportunities as ‘First World’ ones.3 However, it is this very demand, he argues, that is also responsible for negative reactions to it—namely a return to narrow ideas of identity, simplified narratives of homogeneous nations based on single cultural identities, and a desire to keep the world out—to erect barriers against foreign bodies and thus to deny that everyone has a right to equality of opportunity. It is this tension that animates the central problem that this book is concerned with, namely, that despite globalizing forces, both the idea of the nation and people’s emotional attachment to that idea are making a strong comeback, creating a significant problem for those who want to encourage a more cosmopolitan outlook in museums. Simply put, is it possible to respond to these contradictory forces in ways that do not encourage xenophobic reactions? This question is keenly felt by museums that engage with cosmopolitan discourses through migration histories, using the movements of people and objects to attempt a destabilization of the idea of a homogeneous nation, especially in relation to the notion that particular places are associated with particular ethnicities. Both in settler nations such as Australia and in the ‘Old World’ of European nations, museums have attempted to use histories of migration to deal with the tension between the need to embody an exclusivist notion of national identity and the need to help contemporary citizens come to grips with the increasingly transnational forces impacting their daily lives and sense of identity. Doing so is, as Whitehead, Lloyd, Eckersley, and Mason argue,4 is a question not only of having to respond to increasingly diverse audiences but of the fact that places are, in a very real sense, changing both physically and culturally in response to significant movements of new populations into them. Such changes have radical implications for how one understands the relationship between people and place and thus on narratives of identity as well as belonging. How museums construct the relationship between place, people, and culture is therefore significant in terms of whether or not they

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Ana María Vara, ‘A South American Approach to Metamorphosis as a Horizon of Equality: Focusing on Controversies over Lithium’, Current Sociology 63, no. 1 (January 2015): 102, quoted in Beck, The Metamorphosis of the World, 60. Christopher Whitehead, Katherine Lloyd, Susannah Eckersley, and Rhiannon Mason, Museums, Migration and Identity in Europe: Peoples, Places and Identities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).

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can help people understand and process the impact of cosmopolitics in ways that encourage a cosmopolitan ethic rather than xenophobic reactions. The difficulty, of course, is that if done purely through a cosmopolitan discourse, the result could in fact be an increase in xenophobia. In this chapter, then, I want to use Beck’s distinction between cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitics to understand the impact that different approaches to thinking about place in relation to histories of migration can have on developing curatorial strategies that encourage a cosmopolitan ethic without increasing the chances of a xenophobic response. To do so, I am going to focus on my own part of the world—Australia. This is because the unique context of a settler colonial nation poses some unique issues in thinking about relations between people and place. Whereas museums in Europe have tried to destabilize the idea that nations were ever homogeneous in the first place,5 a settler nation such as Australia has to begin from a different starting point. The standard means to destabilize the idea that nations are homogenous involves representing populations as the result of constant human movement across time by locating nations within transnational or even global histories; analysing their populations as a result of that history, seeking to find diversity within; and, finally, seeking to represent diversity at the local level.6 In a settler nation, however, the starting point is somewhat more complex, as all people other than Indigenous peoples are either the descendants of, or are themselves, migrants. For the settler group, the idea that the nation is immemorial and thus that there is a natural alignment between a nation and a people, is simply not possible. For Indigenous Australians,7 however, the situation is the exact opposite. In their narrative, they have always been here and the ‘settlers’ are the ‘other’. In a context where colonization meant dispossession from their land, the politics of native title land claims makes it difficult to talk about Indigenous migrations over thousands of years, for to do so would be to undermine the claim that they are 5

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See Andrea Witcomb, ‘Curating Relations between “Us” and “Them”: The Changing Role of Migration Museums in Australia’, in Curatopia: Museums and the Future of Curatorship, ed. Philipp Schorch and Conal McCarthy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018); Whitehead et al., Museums, Migration and Identity in Europe; and Laurence Gouriévidis, ed., Museums and Migration: History, Memory and Politics (Milton Park: Routledge, 2014). See Whitehead et al., Museums, Migration and Identity in Europe. Indigenous Australians is a general term that covers both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders peoples.

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the First Peoples with a prior right to the land.8 Settler nations are thus the prime example of the way in which cosmopolitics has literally shaped the body politic—from the moment of colonization and attendant dispossession of Indigenous peoples to how it has integrated successive waves of migrants into an imagined national community and sought to recognize, or not recognize, the claims and experiences of their First Peoples. Australians, too, want to imagine a national community that is homogeneous—a community in which being Australian stands for a particular set of values and cultural traditions. More often than not, those values are expressed in terms of the legacy of those who came from the British Isles, a tendency that returns us to the problem of associating particular places with particular ethnic groups. The result, from this perspective, is a graduated scale of Australianness, with those whose forebears came from the British Isles being Australians, while those who came from elsewhere have a double identity—Italian Australians, Greek Australians, Chinese Australians. The more recent the migration, the more intense this demarcation becomes. At the very extreme, xenophobic discourses, particularly those based on Islamophobia, mark people as being ‘un-Australian’. The result is that the politics of migration is played out over the terrain of cultural identity, with that identity understood as a function of original ethnicity or religious and racial identities. Identity is not seen as something that can be developed over time, in situ, regardless of origins. From this perspective, being Australian is not, therefore, a function of living in Australia and being changed by that experience but of cultural origins. Dislodging this cultural perspective is therefore central to any attempt to work against a xenophobic perspective on relations between identity and nation. Central to that effort is how we construct our understanding of place itself. It matters whether place is understood as a fixed entity or whether it is understood as the result of a process. In the former, a place makes the people, leading to exclusionary understandings of belonging and identity. In the latter, one’s relationship to a place is more fluid and is the result of multiple social relations. As Doreen Massey put it,9 when arguing for an understanding of place that privileges process,

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See Ann Curthoys, ‘An Uneasy Conversation: The Multicultural and the Indigenous’, in Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand, ed. John Docker and Gerhard Fischer (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2000), 21–36. Doreen Massey, ‘A Global Sense of Place’, Marxism Today (June 1991): 28.

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what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus … where a larger proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or even a continent. In addition to teasing out which understanding of place is operating in each exhibition, I analyse the ways in which these understandings of place rely on different positions in relation to cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitics as differentiated by Beck, resulting in different understandings of identity. While all understandings of place as the result of social processes help with developing cosmopolitan outlooks, not all of these understandings help with understanding place as shaped by cosmopolitics. My basic proposition is that it is possible to discern three different ways of producing a cosmopolitan ethic through a focus on place as a process, each resulting in an understanding of identity that either does or does not help with understanding cosmopolitics and our relation to it. The first strategy produces place as an amalgam of the people that come to it—without privileging either ethnic or cultural identity. While this is an inclusive strategy in that there is no hierarchy between the various newcomers and thus identity is associated with a particular place rather than ethnicity or culture, the lack of a reflection on cosmopolitical contexts makes it impossible to situate that place within cosmopolitical forces at all. The result is an inability to understand a place as a result of those larger forces Massey alludes to. In the second strategy, place is produced through a focus on ethnic identities in order to promote a narrative of tolerance. Belonging to the nation, in this strategy, is not situated in a particular place but rather in the emotional landscapes that can be created in any place by maintaining ethnicized cultural practices. In turn, a cosmopolitan ethic becomes the consumption of ethnic cultures other than one’s own. Here, there is a privileging of a cosmopolitan ethic but cosmopolitics is not evident. The third strategy, however, focuses on representing identity as the result of a dialogue between a place, the people who have occupied it in the past, and those who occupy it now. This strategy, in being attentive to the ways in which identity is produced over time, in place, and through a recognition of the relations between people and place that are, themselves, the result of cosmopolitical forces, is the most likely to produce a cosmopolitan ethic that does not reinscribe relations between people as those of self and other.

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I pursue my analysis through three exhibitions which focused on particular places as a methodology for engaging with the experience of living with difference as opposed to exhibitions which use ethnicity to represent cultural diversity. Between them, they capture a broad time span of exhibition-making, from the 1980s to the early 2000s, reflecting a history of experimentation in this field of curatorial practice. While I will be presenting them chronologically, the intention is not to present a history of progress. The narrative is more convoluted, for a focus on place does not, by itself, ensure that the problems associated with a focus on ethnicity go away.

Hyde Park Barracks, 1984: An Early Cosmopolitical Prototype My first case study is Changing Faces of Sydney, a display which stood from 1984 to 1988 at the Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney. The display forms part of a particular moment in the museumization of Hyde Park Barracks, a former barracks for colonial convicts, then an asylum, and finally government offices before becoming a museum managed by the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences. For Tony Bennett, the first suite of exhibitions at the Hyde Park Barracks, along with the establishment of the People’s Palace in Glasgow, marks a new moment in the use of ‘the people’ in exhibition-making. This is because rather than sentimentalizing the lives of the working classes and thereby reinforcing hegemonic interests, as done by folkloric museums in the open museum tradition, these museums were concerned with the social life and everyday habits of the citizens of their cities. As the official museum guide put it, ‘The Hyde Park Barracks presents a social history of New South Wales. Rather than a history of great individuals, it is a history of people’s everyday lives and experiences. The exhibitions cover two centuries of Australian social life: people celebrating, immigrating, coming to town for the show, building homes, living in the Barracks.’10 It was an approach which, as a fundraising brochure put it in October 1983, was ‘based on the premise that history is as much the creation of everyday people as political and economic events engineered

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Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, The Mint and the Hyde Park Barracks, exh. cat. (Sydney, Trustees of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, 1985), 16, quoted in Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 120.

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by “great men”.’11 In taking this approach, the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences was keen to ensure that it reflected the experiences of its visitors, arguing that ‘In relating the patterns and pre-occupations of the ordinary past, we will be linking it to the ordinary present, and thereby incorporating in the displays, the experience of the huge majority of our visitors’.12 The point is important as the aim here was not simply to represent ordinary people but to make connections between the past and the present, to create a space that enabled a wide variety of Sydneysiders to recognize themselves as part of the social and cultural life of the city—to create belonging. Developed at a time when Australian museums were just beginning to engage with the notion that they had a responsibility to represent Australia’s cultural diversity but well before the practice of community consultation was established, this was one of the first social history exhibitions developed in New South Wales, despite the fact that those working on it had a background in decorative arts and only one was a historian.13 The collection they worked from, apart from the artefacts from the archaeological dig at the site itself, was that of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, where decorative arts, rather than social history, which was yet to be properly established, was dominant. In some cases, objects were on loan from descendants, indicating the beginnings of a curatorial practice in which individual stories were becoming important. The curators also used images from newspapers, the State Library of New South Wales, and private family collections. The Changing Faces of Sydney display focused on the contribution of migration to the social and cultural landscape and Sydneysiders’ experience of the city. In choosing a vignette approach based on personal and family histories, curators were able to address issues of ethnicity, class, and gender over time, as well as to pay attention both to what people brought with them and to what they built in Sydney, thus tracing the city’s changing landscape. This was a different way to tell the story of a growing city. As they put it, in a theme label for the display: Migration to Sydney has determined the style of the city—every building, every street, the very naming of the city itself reflects its origins.

11

12 13

Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, ‘The Hyde Park Barracks’, brochure for the Reception of the Power House Patrons, 30 October 1983, file MRS221, Hyde Park Barracks Publicity Mat[erial]. Ibid. Margaret Betteridge, interview by Andrea Witcomb, Sydney Town Hall, February 2016.

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Until the 1850s the city’s character was dominated by its convict beginnings but the discovery of gold in 1851 changed this. From this time successive waves of immigrants arrived each bringing a different set of customs and traditions which has left a mark on the city. Each migrant has a different reaction to Sydney and each has a different story to tell. This exhibition presents several such stories.14 In other words, in this exhibition, place was made by people and it was made over time, reflecting Massey’s understanding that a place is made through social relations. Thus, while across each of the stories selected by the curators there are examples of ‘heirloom culture’ that signify the identities that migrants brought with them—from ethnic to gender and class—attention is paid to what they built in Sydney itself, outside of these identities. This includes not only houses, but also cultural pursuits, businesses, and leisure activities. In other words, the displays are not about identity understood through ethnicity but about everyday life in Sydney and the kinds of activities and aspirations its inhabitants pursued. Some are indeed ‘ordinary’. Julia Stewart, a label tells us, was ‘an impoverished gentlewoman’ who emigrated from England in 1850 with her thirteen-year-old daughter. ‘To support herself she taught music and languages. Her daughter also had to teach other people’s children but escaped her mother’s fate by marrying well’.15 Their display, which came from the Powerhouse Museum’s collection, included personal jewellery and photographs that indicated their desire to live a middle-class life. Other stories connected with places or practices have since become either iconic or a natural part of the everyday lives of Sydneysiders. One of these was the story of Walter Biddell from England, who was involved in setting up a surf life saving programme in Bronte Beach. Surf life saving is now an iconic part of Sydney beach culture, and that connection is implied rather than stated in the label: Walter Biddell emigrated from Surry in the late 1870s and set up in Sydney as a mercantile agent. Following a nervous breakdown in 1904 he discovered

14

15

Trustees of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Changing Faces of Sydney, exh. cat., 1984, file MRS 259/1–15, Exhibition Catalogues and Brochures, Hyde Park Barracks, 1984–87. Ibid.

Towards a Cosmopolitical Exhibition Practice

the beneficial effects of daily sunbathing and surfing at Bronte Beach. Biddell entered the battle of the beaches with all the force of his dominating personality. He became a member of the Bronte Surf Club and his ideas of surf rescue later influenced other surf clubs. Because of their unusual rescue methods, Bronte Club was banned from interclub competition for several years.16 The assumption here is that audiences would know what the ‘battle of the beaches’ was all about. In other words, the audience for the exhibition was imagined as Sydneysiders, regardless of their ethnicity. The most interesting display from the point of view of how ‘the other’, i.e. non-Anglo-Celtic, migrant is represented is the story of Ivan Repin, a Russian who escaped the turmoil of the 1917 revolution. Unable to practise as an engineer, he became an entrepreneur, developing an extensive network of cafés and restaurants, introducing Sydneysiders to café culture well before Italian Australians took over in the 1950s. Focusing on the material culture of his restaurants, with their art deco china, cutlery, and modern look, a picture is built of an aspect of Sydney life that many Sydneysiders going to the exhibition would remember as part of their daily rituals—thus naturalizing something which was, at one point in time, ‘foreign’. As the subtheme label for Ivan Repin’s story put it, the chain of coffee shops founded by Ivan Repin became a Sydney institution. They filled a need in Sydney’s social life and stimulated a revolution in coffee-drinking habits. Many faithful patrons still claim that they have not tasted a decent cup of coffee since the last Repin’s closed in 1970.17 While written in the third-person curatorial voice rather than the first, there is a sense that what is conjured up are in fact the personal and collective memories of going to these coffee houses, as the objects on display become an ‘identity object’ not for Repin himself but for Sydneysiders. ‘Identity objects’ are, according to Whitehead, Mason, Eckersley, and Lloyd,18 objects which are indelibly associated with a place. In their description of the possible context

16 17 18

Ibid. Ibid. Christopher Whitehead, Rhiannon Mason, Susannah Eckersley, and Katherine Lloyd, ‘Place, Identity and Migration and European Museums’, in Whitehead et al., Museums, Migration and Identity in Europe, 36–37.

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for these objects, narratives of trauma loom large, as do heirloom objects, objects made of local materials, or objects that speak to movement across space, signifying cross-cultural exchange. The material from Repin’s coffee house, however, is unlike any on this list, for the identity it conjures is not that of the owner—the migrant and the place he left behind—but of his customers—Sydneysiders. It is almost as if, in being an empty signifier for Repin and his identity story, these objects become open to the identity work of others who are not the explicit subject of the story but, through implication, become so. In that way, a migrant’s story becomes a collective story that has almost nothing to do with migrant history and everything to do with life in Sydney. Repin is a vehicle for enabling the stories and memories of the visitors, rather than a request to identify with him as a person. From this perspective, the lack of a first-person narrative voice is not a weakness but a strength, questioning the often-made assumption, including by myself, that the use of third-person narratives prevents identification practices rather than enables them. Sometimes, it seems, porosity is one way to open up an understanding of what constitutes belonging because it allows others to insert themselves into the story, thus making the ‘other’ part of ‘us’. In presenting Sydney as the result of multiple migration stories—each of which contributed something to the physical, social, and cultural landscape of Sydney and thus to the way in which Sydneysiders lived their everyday lives—this exhibition normalized the effects of a cosmopolitical phenomenon. What it did not do, however, was pay any attention to the impact of this phenomenon on the area’s First Peoples or to inquire too deeply into the quality of relations between the different groups. That would have required the use of first-person narrative voice or a more critical engagement with the archive, neither of which were yet part of Australian curatorial practices.19 Despite the point about people’s reactions to Sydney, there was little attention given to how the place itself might have impacted how people developed their lives there—an absence that also meant there was no engagement with Indigenous histories of the place and hence of a history of displacement.

19

However, only two years later, in 1986, the Migration Museum in Adelaide did recognize that the reverse of migration history was the colonization and dispossession of Indigenous Australians. See Witcomb, ‘Curating Relations between “Us” and “Them”’; Eureka Jane Henrich, ‘Whose Stories Are We Telling? Exhibitions of Migration History in Australian Museums 1984–2001’ (PhD diss., University of New South Wales, 2012).

Towards a Cosmopolitical Exhibition Practice

Museum Victoria, 1992: A Cosmopolitan Approach to Place— The Limitations of Using ‘Place’ to Mark ‘Ethnicity’ My second case study is very different, having both a strong sense of personal stories that are based on ethnicity but also a strong sense of place. Bridging Two Worlds: Jews, Italians and Carlton opened at Museum Victoria in 1992. It was based on a one-off collaboration between Melbourne’s Jewish Museum, the Italian Historical Society, and Museum Victoria. Developed at the height of Australia’s explicit engagement with the notion of multiculturalism, which encouraged tolerance of diversity, the exhibition was a very conscious attempt to represent the cultural diversity of Australia while also granting this representation the authority of a public institution. In developing the exhibition, the organizers wanted to focus on a single suburb known amongst the wider population as a multicultural hub to demonstrate the ability of people from a wide variety of backgrounds to live together and make a positive contribution to Australian society. As they put it in an a document outlining their ‘Desired Visitor Outcomes’, by focussing on Carlton, an inner suburb of Melbourne which ‘provided a stepping off point for Jews and Italians’ where they ‘formed a community … upon arrival as these provide mutual support and assistance, familiar surroundings and cater to the specific needs of immigrants’, the exhibition team hoped to ‘recognise the positive contributions immigrants have made to Victoria and Australian society’ and demonstrate that ‘cultural diversity is a positive and not a negative reality of Australian life’ and thus that ‘immigrant groups from different backgrounds can live harmoniously together’. They also hoped visitors would understand that ‘Australia has not always treated its immigrants fairly or welcomed them enthusiastically’, that ‘the migration and settlement experience for all immigrants isn’t necessarily an easy process’, and that ‘immigrants come to Victoria seeking a better life, having been forced to leave their homelands due to political/social/economic factors.’20 The reality of what was achieved, however, is somewhat different, and it poses some interesting questions when juxtaposed with my first example, despite their similar understanding of place as being the product of those who come to live in it. One of the first problems the curators faced was the realization that Jews and Italians had not actually coexisted in Carlton but 20

Museum Victoria, ‘Desired Visitor Outcomes—Carlton Exhibition’, file EM/042/39, Exhibition Management, Exhibitions, Jews and Italians in Carlton Exhibition, 1991 to 1992.

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rather that the Italians succeeded the Jews. This made it difficult to represent how they lived together. Instead, the exhibition became more about how they each created a community in Carlton, changing its environs as they did so. As Helen Light, the curator from the Jewish Museum, put it, the exhibition ‘was really the story of all immigrant groups and of all areas in which migrants settled.’21 As she went on to explain, we therefore titled the exhibition Bridging Two Worlds, because Carlton was the first area of settlement in which both of these groups of migrants adjusted to their new world while staying close to their compatriots from their countries of origin, and almost replicated institutions from their country of origin. Light also made the point that the exhibition was about the transitions from a place of origin to a new place, looking both at what was lost and gained, exploring ‘the tensions between the desire and the need to become a part of the new country without losing one’s traditional, cultural and spiritual identity’ and celebrating ‘the culturally complex heterogeneous society such as we’ve continued to enjoy, which is the product of the melding of the old and new.’22 In effect, the exhibition created a conversation between an ‘heirloom’ approach to the representation of multiculturalism, which privileged ethnic identity, and a focus on the place of arrival. However, the conversation became unequal because, despite the intention to address the migrant experience in a new place, the focus was not on how the new place changed ethnic identities but on how traditional ethnic identities were supported and recreated in the new place. This was amplified by the curatorial strategy of a ‘pedagogy of looking’,23 in which dioramas aiming to recreate particular environments are used to transport visitors back in time. In this case, the strategy was to recreate aspects of Lygon and Drummond Streets, the main shopping street and a residential street respectively, effectively collapsing two distinct histories of migration into a single space and creating a time/space compression. According to Light, the exhibition ‘was always conceived as

21

22 23

Helen Light, ‘Jews and Italians in Carlton’ (paper presented at the Reflections on Cultural Diversity, Citizenship and Museums workshop, 27 November 2014, for the Collecting Institutions, Cultural Diversity and the Making of Citizenship in Australia since the 1970s ARC Discovery Project, DP120100594). Light, ‘Jews and Italians in Carlton’. Witcomb, ‘Curating Relations between “Us” and “Them”’.

Towards a Cosmopolitical Exhibition Practice

a streetscape because that’s how Carlton’s known and recognised, and … we could incorporate all the things we chose to explore. Arrivals, settlement, homes, and backyards.’24 While the curatorial team wanted ‘to convey something of the balance between the maintenance of old cultures and the adaptation to the new’,25 their choices actually reflect an heirloom approach to cultural representation within a framework that celebrates these traditions as a valuable addition to the mainstream culture, achieving what Ian McShane called ‘an enrichment narrative’.26 Thus, The Jewish bakeries and the Italian delicatessen showed how migration altered and enriched the platters and palettes of all Australians. The Italian tailor and shoemaker highlight how Italians brought to Australia a real sense of style and fashion. The kosher butcher, [and] the Jewish bookshop … introduce[d] outlets for supplies of goods and services which enabled them to practise their rituals.27 While there was an attempt to use some family-run businesses to ‘show how migrants became part of Australian culture’ such as the ‘lolly shop, the traditional Australian milk bar run by the Cohen family for over 30 years selling liquorice bullets and Sennett’s ice cream, and Mrs Steinberg’s drapery which boasted clothing with the 1956 Olympic insignia’,28 the balance was heavily tipped towards iconic ethnic markers. The second curatorial strategy was the use of a sound landscape to amplify the authenticity of the recreated landscapes. This strategy is part of what I call a ‘pedagogy of listening’,29 in which first-person narratives are used to provide a sign of authenticity to the claims being made, in this case around the maintenance of culture and its significance for the community under consideration, as well as the claims that the suburb of Carlton was an example of a successful multicultural experiment. As Light put it,

24 25 26

27 28 29

Light, ‘Jews and Italians in Carlton’. Ibid. Ian McShane, ‘Challenging or Conventional? Migration History in Australian Museums’, in National Museums: Negotiating Histories; Conference Proceedings, ed. Daryl McIntyre and Kirsten Wehner (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2001), 122–33. Light, ‘Jews and Italians in Carlton’. Ibid. Witcomb, ‘Curating Relations between “Us” and “Them”’.

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we included a soundscape because we wanted to induce the living sounds and voices speaking Yiddish, Italian and broken English intermixed with personal reminiscences by Australians of cantorial singing and Italian Catholic nurses. Children singing Yiddish songs and wonderful Italian melodies. There are schoolyard ditties and regular street sounds. In all the sound of a culturally diverse neighbourhood.30

Fig. 1: Installation view, Jews and Italians in Carlton exhibition. The use of dioramas ‘transport’ visitors into Carlton’s main street, Lygon Street. The display clearly places the visitor amongst the architecture that characterizes the suburb, with Victorian terrace houses and shop fronts signalled by iron lace and façades. It provides the illusion of walking along and looking into the shop windows of Lygon Street. Opposite are traditional displays showing objects illustrating various aspects of community life. Image RP2798.

Courtesy of Museums Victoria.

This pedagogy of listening is also carried through to the labels, which were written in collaboration with Arnold Zable, a well-known Jewish Australian writer in Melbourne. Their text used Yiddish, Italian, and English. While the 30

Light, ‘Jews and Italians in Carlton’.

Towards a Cosmopolitical Exhibition Practice

use of first-person narrative occurred rarely, the labels were peppered with colloquial words that would have been very familiar to Jewish and Italian families, giving the language a sense of familiarity, or of home, enabling the exhibition to produce an emotional zone that would have enabled a Proustian form of memory to emerge for visitors connected to the landscapes being evoked—highly personal, highly sensorial, constituting an example of what Svetlana Boym called restorative nostalgia, in which the focus is on reproducing lost homes.31 The evocation went beyond individual memories and connections, however, as Zable was also able to conjure the atmosphere of the place, giving life to some of the exhibition’s recreations and thus inviting visitors to imagine the sense of community that was built by these two migrant groups. The evocative power of these curatorial strategies offers a gift to those who are descendants of the migrant groups by acknowledging the significance of their identity as part of the Australian mosaic while also indicating the gift that they gave the wider Australian public in making their nation a multicultural one—with all the riches that gift entails in terms of a cosmopolitan environment. Here is an example of the way in which Zable built this imaginative sensorium, with its double audience, through the written text. The first part addresses the Jewish audience, whereas the ending points out the gift to the wider population: Pickles and Rye To feel at home in the new world—ah, for so many it meant, first and foremost, to feel at home in the stomach. So it was indeed a delight when Jewish grocery shops sprang up in Carlton selling such delicacies as salted herring, pickled cucumbers, smoked salmon and matzos for Passover, all kosher, delivered by bicycle or horse and buggy. Better still to go in person to Boltin’s or Shillit’s or Saffer’s or Cohen’s, to name but a few—not only to buy, but to pour out one’s tsores, woes and grievances. From the grocers you could proceed to the bakers to purchase onion rolls and fresh rye bread from Berland’s, European style cakes from Monaco’s, and fresh challahs, Sabbath bread, from Glickman’s.… And if you were sent on an errand as a child, billy can in hand to obtain milk from Pahoof’s dairy, you would receive a piece of barley sugar with each can. Now that was Carlton service—a machiah, a sheer pleasure to go shopping.32 31 32

Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). Label text reproduced in Arnold Zable, Ilma Martinuzzi O’Brien, Helen Light, Anna Malgorzewicz, Bridging Two Worlds: Jews, Italians and Carlton, exh. cat. (Melbourne: Mu-

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The representation of this cultural identity as vibrant and ongoing, rather than as embalmed within exhibitions that focus on heirloom culture embodied in a ‘suitcase’ narrative,33 is entirely the result of this approach to recreating particular places together with the use of a soundscape to amplify the emotional dimensions of this focus on the streetscape. The exhibition was thus highly located and precise, giving it a sense of authenticity for both those who remembered the landscape and those who knew Carlton as one of the city’s premier multicultural locations, frequenting it for its coffee houses and restaurants, delicatessens, and traces of a more bohemian Melbourne. By showing how different migrant groups established their own cultural milieu as part of the fabric of their new environment, this exhibition also demonstrated how these resources also became available to other Australians, something which is signalled through the inclusion of a real coffee shop where one could both smell and drink a cup of coffee in the final gallery of the exhibition, and the attempt to open up discussion on the meaning of community by pointing to the importance of parks, laneways, verandas, and spaces for conviviality as crucial to enabling community to flourish. The exhibition, therefore, fostered a cosmopolitan ethic, following a classic ‘enrichment’ narrative that gave voice to ethnic groups, representing them as part of the public space and as having made a genuine contribution to society. However, they remained ‘ethnic’ rather than becoming Australian. Conversely, Australians from an Anglo-Celtic background can sample and adopt the flavour of multiculturalism—mainly by expanding their culinary taste—and get to demonstrate their cosmopolitanism without ever having to reflect on their own migration histories or their role in how hard or easy each new wave of migrants experiences their own migration process. In a way, everyone comes to own Carlton’s heritage. This allows a sense of cumulative building of a unique place—a place that is associated in the minds of particular ethnic groups with themselves and eventually, in the general population, with the emergence of a multicultural, cosmopolitan Australia—as signalled by the coffee shop, now a Melbourne institution. The exhibition thus treads a balance between essentializing ethnic cultural identities while also pointing to common human

33

seum of Victoria; Jewish Museum of Australia; Italian Historical Society Co.As.It, 1993), 12. McShane, ‘Challenging or Conventional?’, 122–33.

Towards a Cosmopolitical Exhibition Practice

needs in making oneself ‘at home’ and to the ability of all groups to value cultural differences. The extent to which audiences were given an opportunity to reflect on the nature of the accommodation by dominant groups needed to facilitate such a process was not, however, part of the conversation. The value of cosmopolitanism is taken to be self-evident. What becomes clear from this account is that focusing on one place does not guarantee the ability to focus on cross-cultural encounters and exchanges. The setting may have been Carlton, but the focus was on ethnicity as a marker of cultural identity. The place became the environment in which identity was practised via the establishment of environments that facilitated its ongoing life in the present. My final example is very different. As its exhibition brochure put it, ‘Migration Memories explores the stories of 14 people from a diverse range of cultural backgrounds who now call two distinctly different areas of regional Australia home: the opal-mining town of Lightning Ridge in New South Wales and the Murray River town of Robinvale in Victoria.’34 Both these towns of seven to eight thousand residents have had a distinct migration history, and both are home to people from over forty different countries. They also have community organizations such as historical societies, schools, social service organizations, radio stations, museums, and galleries that were willing to support the Migration Memories exhibition project and facilitate access to individuals in the community, ensuring a wide cross-section of the local community could be involved in the making of the exhibition if they wished to. Unlike my other examples, in this exhibition, the past was not reached primarily through archives but through conversations with members of the presentday communities in these two towns.

National Museum of Australia, 2007: Using Place to Open Up Difficult Conversations in a Cosmopolitical Context—The Migration Memories Exhibition Migration Memories was an exhibition explicitly aimed at moving away from representing migration histories as embodiments of multiculturalism. Instead of presenting ethnicities and cultures in a narrative that either promoted the celebration of cultural diversity or the notion of rebirth in a new 34

National Museum of Australia, Migration Memories, exh. broch. (Canberra: National Museum of Australia 2007).

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country, it was interested in negotiating the space between individual experiences, memories, and histories by using place as a methodology that ‘might create empathetic contact between very different histories and experiences.’35 Its focus differed both from my previous example, which focused on the centrality of culture and ethnicity to collective identity, and from the idea behind my first example, which simply produced place as the sum total of the various layers of migration over time. Neither of those looked at relations between groups in a single place or facilitated a reflection on such relations. In Migration Memories, however, the focus shifted from an interest in culture to an interest in history, as well as in the ways histories have been remembered and given significance by individuals. This dialogue between history and memory created a multilayered space in which exhibition participants and visitors alike could recognize commonalities of experience across time and cultural differences. The methodology that led to this outcome was based on the following strategies: • •

• • • •

a focus on migration history rather than migrant cultures; an interest in cultural diversity as expressive of interaction between different people rather than a description of people who are different from the dominant culture; a focus on personal understanding of migration experience in relation to historical context; a focus on specific local migration histories and the material qualities of place; the use of collaborative methods of exhibition development with participants and professionals; and the use of design strategies within visual and aural media that would engage audience imagination, support the agency of personal experience, and suggest a sense of connection between the exhibits and with viewers.36

Such strategies meant that the exhibition was attentive to incorporating personal voices not only through words (text and audio) but also visual media such as drawings and maps by participants. Allowing these visual media to be 35 36

‘About the Research’, Migration Memories website, accessed 7 April 2019, http://migra tionmemories.net.au/html/project_research.htm. ‘About the Research’, Migration Memories.

Towards a Cosmopolitical Exhibition Practice

juxtaposed to the participants’ objects enabled visitors to use their imaginations to link the two, rather than having meaning explained by the curator. At the same time, the participants’ voices were contextualized by the curatorial voice, whose role was to provide the historical context for the stories at a number of scales—from the global/international context around the push factors for migration to national and local contexts within Australia—thus pointing to the wider cosmopolitics embedded within the history of a place. Such a strategy ensured not only that the agency of the participants was clearly signalled in the design of the exhibition, which included their names next to what they had to say, but that it did so in a way clearly showing that their stories were in dialogue with the curator’s own voice, thus inviting the visitor into a dialogue with them. Conversation was both the method behind the exhibition and the form of the presentation.37 This also meant there was a constant dialogue between formal primary sources, such as archival documents and images, and those produced by each storyteller, including memory maps. In some cases, the archival research gave families more details of their history than they had before they contributed to the project. This was the case, for example, for Gabor Nagy’s family, who received a photograph of Nagy as a young man when Mary Hutchison, the curator, located his official Displaced Person form, which included a photograph of him taken in Naples. Another important aspect to the exhibition was the embedding of these stories within the localities the exhibition focused on. As with Bridging Two Worlds, Migration Memories sought to embody the sounds and feel of each town it profiled. In Robinvale, the local Tongan choir was recorded during a service in the Seventh-Day Adventist church. In Lightning Ridge, residents were recorded talking to each other in a multitude of languages as well as in English. This is different from the standard use of oral history, which usually privileges the voice of the interviewee, without the interviewer, resulting in no sense of a conversation and thus no sense of a story being actively shaped by both the interviewee and the interviewer. What we get is usually an information bite and rarely an insight into someone’s emotional landscape. In Migrant Memories, the purpose of oral histories was to provide a sense of conversation not only between participants but also between participants and 37

For an example of what this looked like in practice, see ‘Exhibition Design’, Migration Memories website, accessed 18 March 2021, http://migrationmemories.net.au/html/m aking_exhibitiondesign.htm.

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audiences. The exhibition’s sense of migration history was also expansive and ranged ‘from the colonial period to the present and included the impact of colonizing migrations on Indigenous people’s movements within Australia’.38 They involved stories from third-generation descendants to recent migrants, including young refugees still at school. The value of the exhibition springs from this focus on conversation and the way it was embedded in the process of development, in the design and storytelling mechanisms, and, eventually, in the conversations the exhibition itself generated amongst visitors. This meant that cross-cultural exchange was embedded not only in some of the stories but also in people’s interest in each other’s stories. This reached across generations, ethnicities, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants and audience members. While strongest in situ, in the two towns that gave rise to the two exhibitions, visitor responses at their joint showing at the National Museum of Australia indicated that people were able to respond empathetically to the experiences of those whose stories the exhibition told as well as to use these stories to reflect on their own location and identity in relation to these others. As Ursula Frederick, one of the people who worked with curator Mary Hutchison to collect and document conversations with visitors in Lightning Ridge said of her experience, ‘Through their comments people were constantly making personal connections. The exhibition made them really think about their own family’s place in Australia; how they came to be there and where they were from. They were more interested in talking about this than answering questions about the exhibition itself.’39 In Lightning Ridge, for example, one can hear the visitor going through this process of reflection as they describe the exhibition as being reintroduced to one’s own community, or as one can see it a large part of a large family—a community is supposed to be that. And learning actually so much more, what one never knew about individuals or members or families, and some very touching stories which were never told. And yes, being reintroduced to the community. It’s like, I think, you have walked into a huge living room and there are all these people who have all known each

38 39

‘About the Research’, Migration Memories. Ursula Frederick, ‘Researcher’s Reflections on the Conversations at Each Venue’, Migration Memories website, accessed 8 April 2019, http://migrationmemories.net.au/html/ making_responses.html.

Towards a Cosmopolitical Exhibition Practice

other and who thought they knew each other. But you actually connected some of them more to each other by reintroducing them to each other. Another conversation, this time with Mary Hutchison, reveals the impact of the exhibition design, with its use of colour, named voices, and attention to the scale between local and global. Here, through conversation, we can sense the visitor tentatively describing what they saw as they slowly think their way into an analysis of their impression, finally revealing the exhibition’s impact on them as they become more secure in their interpretation, stating that the world is a big map and where we are, where we find ourselves, is a part of it divided by waters or even the rest can be divided from each other by borders created by people. And I saw you [the curator] as looking into our section and within it just having our very own inset and by just almost as defining the colours within that inset of a painting and seeing also their connections to each other—what sort of harmony or view that part of the painting creates—you have broken down all the borders. We are looking at a segment of the painting but we are connecting to everything else, to the rest of the painting because colours, everything in it, seems to be flowing to the rest of the painting. So we are part of a big painting. But you have just perhaps—what does an art critic do? Look at a segment and analyse it. That’s what you have done. And you have also brought out how it harmonizes with the rest and how it connects actually to the rest of the canvas. That’s how I see it. Relations between different groups of people, and between those people and different places, were thus what the exhibition was about, effectively as well as affectively capturing the nature of our contemporary cosmopolitical society. In sensing that there were connections to each other, to their place in the world as well as to the rest of the world, visitors were not caught by their individual cultural identities but were sensing patterns and connections between all of their stories and recognizing how together they had created a community. These feelings were produced through the exhibition itself by its embodiment of these connections through a combination of life stories, history, and memories, effectively building what I call a ‘pedagogy of feeling’.40 40

Andrea Witcomb, ‘Toward a Pedagogy of Feeling: Understanding How Museums Create a Space for Cross-Cultural Encounters’, in Museum Theory, ed. Andrea Witcomb and Kylie Message. The International Handbooks of Museum Studies vol. 1 (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 321–44.

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It is to the methodology behind the exhibition that we must return if we want to understand what is on offer here and how it is different from the other exhibitions. To begin with, this exhibition is not positioned as a global history, a national history, or a history of a single place. It combines all three and in so doing, it establishes connections between places across both space and time. People are the carriers of those connections and they do so across places and generations. The past is therefore part of the present. Nothing spoke more clearly about that than the stories by Indigenous people or by people who recognized the links of their own stories to the experiences of Indigenous people as a result of colonization. A good example of this is the story of Joan Treweeke. Originally from Melbourne, Treweeke’s family bought a cattle station in Lightning Ridge in the 1960s from the descendants of the original leaseholders. Treweeke chose three objects found on her property—an Indigenous stone tool, a shard of Chinese ceramics, and a branding iron to illuminate her story and, in so doing, opened up a process of reflection in which her ownership of the property placed her in conversation with the original Indigenous inhabitants of the area, the Chinese workers who worked there in the nineteenth century, and the pastoralists who colonized the area. Her choice of these artefacts was not simply to tell a story of successive occupation but to illuminate relations between these different groups of people, all of whom were enmeshed in processes of colonization, and to open up questions between the past and the present using herself as the link between them. Curatorial work by Hutchison placed these artefacts within the broader history of colonial expansion and movement of peoples, in this case the British Empire and the movement of the Chinese to both Australia and the United States as part of an indentured labour system as well as the gold rushes. Maps by surveyors show the dispossession of the original inhabitants, the Yuwaalaraay people, and historical photographs point to some of the accommodations that Indigenous people had to make in order to survive, including working on pastoral stations such as the one that Joan’s family bought, while the use of Chinese workers on the station is documented in records of pay still held at the station. Treweeke’s own words show both how the place itself became part of her own life journey and her recognition that the area she calls home continues to be of spiritual significance to the local Indigenous people who regularly

Towards a Cosmopolitical Exhibition Practice

visit to maintain their connections to their traditional lands and pass on their Indigenous knowledge to their children.41 Objects, then, did not stand in for cultural identity but for memories and experiences that are connected to significant historical moments, even though those moments are embodied in the personal experiences of individual people. Connections between different groups of people are recognized, as is the nature of the relations between them. However, these relations are not highlighted in a didactic way but allowed to be emergent—there in the gaps between the juxtaposition of different documents and different voices. Finally, this exhibition mixed elements from various genres of exhibitionmaking. It used a pedagogy of reading to provide historical background, but it did so with a clear authorial voice, that of Mary Hutchison, the curator, thus setting this material explicitly in conversation with the life stories of individual participants. Something that is usually rendered in the third person in order to ‘naturalize’ it was here rendered in the first person, revealing the process of narrating the past as history and as another way of understanding what was helping to shape individual experience. A pedagogy of listening was in use, but in ways that spoke to the emotional landscapes underpinning each participant’s choice of object to embody their migration story. The objects were used to evoke a landscape of memory which provided the key to understanding not only what was important to each individual but also how those landscapes were the result of historical forces. While a dialogue between objects, voices, text, images, or documents is the stuff of any exhibition, it is the particular way in which they were deployed by Migration Memories that enabled this exhibition to move out of the prison of cultural identity and, in so doing, stage a ground on which cross-cultural encounters may occur.

41

Images and details on which this discussion is based can be found at the ‘Joan Treweeke: A Colonial Migration Perspective’ page on the Migration Memories website: http://migrationmemories.net.au/html/lightningridge/treweeke2.htm (accessed 11 January 2022).

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Conclusion Our starting point was to explore whether a focus on place as process could help to overcome rising xenophobia and encourage a cosmopolitan ethic based on an understanding of cosmopolitics. It would seem that this is only a possibility if we move away from cultural understandings of identity which privilege ethnicity, religious identities, or race while also paying attention to the question of scale between the local, national, and global. A further point is the need for careful management of different voices, not as a result of wanting to privilege diversity for its own sake but as a result of wanting to explore relations across difference. As we saw with the Hyde Park Barracks display, downplaying culture and ethnicity is more inclusive and opens up a wider sense of belonging to a place; the benefit of not preaching tolerance is that diversity is simply normalized. However, the lack of attention to scalar issues led to an inability to deal with structural relations across difference, or what Beck calls cosmopolitics, leading to an unreflective understanding of the present or the impact of colonization. The problem comes to light the moment ethnically based understandings of heritage are brought into the picture, as with Bridging Two Worlds. There, a focus on place was unable to either deliver an understanding of cosmopolitics or normalize a cosmopolitan ethics, remaining trapped within a cosmopolitan ethic that tends towards the celebrational rather than encouraging a more reflective engagement with the ways in which multicultural societies both developed and function today. In finding a way to move across difference, between past and present and across scalar understandings of place, Migration Memories, by contrast, found a way to open a space in which belonging to a place was not predicated on defining identities but on finding communality in histories of mobility and attachments to place. This communality, however, did not obscure relations of power and difference, reflecting the reality of cosmopolitics in ways that opened up the possibility of a more critical engagement with the history of a place and its legacies in the present and future.

Bibliography Beck, Ulrich. The Metamorphosis of the World. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016. Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge, 1995. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

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Curthoys, Anne. ‘An Uneasy Conversation: The Multicultural and the Indigenous’. In Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand, edited by John Docker and Gerhard Fisher, 21–36. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2000. Gouriévidis, Laurence, ed. Museums and Migration: History, Memory and Politics. Milton Park: Routledge, 2014. Henrich, Eureka Jane. ‘Whose Stories Are We Telling? Exhibitions of Migration History in Australian Museums 1984–2001’. PhD diss., University of New South Wales, 2012. Hutchison, Mary, and Andrea Witcomb. ‘Migration Exhibitions and the Question of Identity: Reflections on the History of the Representation of Migration in Australian Museums, 1986–2011’. In Gouriévidis, Museums and Migration, 228–43. Light, Helen. ‘Jews and Italians in Carlton’. Paper presented at the Reflections on Cultural Diversity, Citizenship and Museums workshop, 27 November 2014, for the Collecting Institutions, Cultural Diversity and the Making of Citizenship in Australia since the 1970s ARC Discovery Project, DP120100594. Massey, Doreen. ‘A Global Sense of Place’. Marxism Today (June 1991): 24–29. McShane, Ian. ‘Challenging or Conventional? Migration History in Australian Museums’. In National Museums: Negotiating Histories; Conference Proceedings, edited by Darryl McIntyre and Kirsten Wehner, 122–33. Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2001. Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences. ‘The Hyde Park Barracks’. Brochure for the Reception of the Power House Patrons, 30 October 1983. File MRS221, Hyde Park Barracks Publicity Mat[erial]. Museum Victoria. ‘Desired Visitor Outcomes—Carlton Exhibition’. File EM/042/39, Exhibition Management, Exhibitions, Jews and Italians in Carlton Exhibition, 1991 to 1992. National Museum of Australia. Migration Memories. Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2007. Exhibition brochure. Trustees of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences. Changing Faces of Sydney. Catalogue, 1984. File MRS 259/1–15, Exhibition Catalogues and Brochures, Hyde Park Barracks, 1984–1987. Whitehead, Christopher, and Katherine Lloyd, Susannah Eckersley, and Rhiannon Mason. Museums, Migration and Identity in Europe: Peoples, Places and Identities. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.

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Whitehead, Christopher, and Rhiannon Mason, Susannah Eckersley, and Katherine Lloyd. ‘Place, Identity and Migration and European Museums’. In Whitehead et al., Museums, Migration and Identity in Europe, 5–52. Witcomb, Andrea. ‘Curating Relations between “Us” and “Them”: The Changing Role of Migration Museums in Australia’. In Curatopia: Museums and the Future of Curatorship, edited by Philipp Schorch and Conal McCarthy, 262–78. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Witcomb, Andrea. ‘Toward a Pedagogy of Feeling: Understanding How Museums Create a Space for Cross-Cultural Encounters’. In Museum Theory, edited by Andrea Witcomb and Kylie Message, 321–44. The International Handbooks of Museum Studies vol. 1. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. Zable, Arnold, and Ilma Martinuzzi O’Brien, Helen Light, and Anna Malgorzewicz. Bridging Two Worlds: Jews, Italians and Carlton. Melbourne: Museum of Victoria; Jewish Museum of Australia; Italian Historical Society Co.As.It., 1993. Exhibition catalogue.

Visiting the Colección Poyón, or Indigeneity and the Nation-State in Guatemala Performing the Nation for Two Hundred Years Sebastián Eduardo Dávila

On 15 September 1821, the independence of what was then called the Captaincy General of Guatemala from its ‘motherland’—Spain was referred to as ‘la madre patria’—was signed by local authorities in Asunción de Guatemala, the colonial designation of what today is the capital of the Guatemalan Republic.1

Fig. 1: Detail from a twenty-quetzal bill.

Photograph by the author.

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In what follows, I will refer to Jordana Dym, ‘Actas de independencia: De la Capitanía General de Guatemala a la República Federal de Centroamérica’, in Independencias, estados y política(s) en a Centroamérica del siglo XIX: Las huellas históricas del bicentenario, ed. David Díaz Arias and Ronny Viales Hurtado (San José: CIHAC, 2012), 3–24.

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Yet it was not an unambiguous or definitive agreement. In fact, the territorial demarcation of today’s state, as well as its full independence, was to be determined over many years to follow. That signing act of 1821, however, became one of the central symbols of the republic’s sovereignty, i.e. of its liberation from colonial rule. It has been celebrated by state authorities every fifteenth of September since then. Celebrations both of and by the state can take many forms, from the declaration of an official holiday to the depiction of the signers on the reverse of every twenty-quetzal bill (fig. 1)—the quetzal being the national currency, which is named after the national bird. Moreover, and this is especially true for last year, there have also been stage-like celebrations funded by the state: exhibitions, films, theatre, dance, and music performances. These official events aim to represent both an imagined national history as well as the achievements of the respective governments that are similarly idealized: such mechanisms lie at the core of Benedict Anderson’s understanding of the nation as an imagined community.2 Drawing on Anderson’s concepts and applying them to the military dictatorship in Argentina, Diana Taylor further highlights the performative dimension of nationhood, wherein performance is a means not of representing but of becoming—for example, a citizen—via the repetition of acts in a theatre-like situation, i.e. in front of an audience.3

El Bicentenario These concepts may be instructive when attending or watching the somewhat extravagant display of Guatemalaness during last year’s activities organized by the Ministry of Culture and Sports to celebrate the bicentennial of the country’s independence. In February, an inaugural ceremony was held and

2 3

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 5–7. Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 91ff. Taylor’s understanding of nationhood is inspired by and entangled with Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity. For Taylor’s later conceptualization of the stage-like situation as ‘scenario’, for instance in the context of the ‘discovery’ of the Americas, see Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 53ff.

Visiting the Colección Poyón, or Indigeneityand the Nation-State in Guatemala

broadcast live via the government’s Facebook channel,4 thus allowing for a double witnessing:5 both of the event and of its public in attendance, who were all members of the government, including the president, who himself performed a ceremonial entrance. During the course of almost two hours, a variety of actors entered a stage purpose-built for the event, installed on top of the ruins of Iximche, a pre-Hispanic city located in a Maya-Kaqchikel area a couple of hours west of the capital—but one could also say it is an archaeological site run by the same ministry that organized the anniversary festivities.6 A Mayan ritual was held around an altar full of flowers and candles, wherein a representative of each of the ‘nation’s peoples’ recognized and gave thanks in different languages for the peaceful, multicultural nature of today’s Guatemala, simultaneously asking for permission from the ‘sacred energies of this place’ in order to initiate the ceremony. There were four actors, representing the Maya, the Xinka, the Afro-diasporic Garifuna, and the ‘mestizas/mestizos’ or ‘ladinas/ladinos’, the latter term broadly referring to those who are not indigenous.7 The national anthem was sung; written by the Cuban poet José Joaquín Palma in the late nineteenth century, it is now accompanied by a marimba, Guatemala’s national instrument. A narration was

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Gobierno de Guatemala, ‘Ceremonia del Bicentenario de Independencia’, Facebook, 27 February 2021, https://www.facebook.com/guatemalagob/videos/935488793922565. Interestingly, the recording omits the part of the ceremony where the president hands over a decorated torch—the ‘Liberty Fire’—to a shirtless man evoking the image of the pre-Hispanic Maya, as viewable in: Andrea Alvizures, ‘Presidente Alejandro Giammattei encendió el “Fuego de la Libertad”’, Radio TGW, 27 February 2021, https://radiotgw. gob.gt/presidente-alejandro-giammattei-encendio-el-fuego-de-la-libertad/. On the recording, a voiceover even refers to us as witnesses: ‘You will be a witness through our lens.’ Unless otherwise noted, all translations of quoted passages are my own. Estuardo Torres, ‘Iximche’, Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes, accessed 29 November 2021, http://mcd.gob.gt/iximche/. Another way of describing the ‘ladino/a’ is as ‘anti-indigenous’, i.e. someone who negates their indigeneity, which is marked as inferior. See Santiago Bastos and Aura Cumes, ‘Introducción: Una investigación colectiva sobre etnicidad e ideologías’, in Bastos and Cumes, Mayanización y vida cotidiana: La ideología multicultural en la sociedad guatemalteca, vol. 1, Introducción y análisis generales (Guatemala: FLACSO; CIRMA; Cholsamaj, 2007), 15. See also Jorge Ramón González Ponciano, ‘La visible invisibilidad de la blancura y el ladino como no blanco en Guatemala’, in Memorias del mestizaje: Cultura política en Centroamérica de 1920 al presente, ed. Charles R. Hale et al. (Guatemala: CIRMA, 2004), 111–132.

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given about developments at a recent state-funded archaeological excavation, followed by a dance piece, itself inspired by such ‘discovery’ and performed by the National Folkloric and Modern Ballet, with music from the National Symphony Orchestra. The event ended with an all-encompassing audio-visual projection onto the Iximche ruins that included the reading of passages from the Mayan-K’iche’ sacred book, the Popol Vuh, and that at one point prominently depicted a national flag filling the entire surface of one of the pyramids (fig. 2). This image is revealing precisely because of its contrast to what seems to be an excessive display of cultural diversity characterizing the whole event. In a stage-like situation, the flag projection evokes the idea of a nation without cultural difference. Notwithstanding the representation of multiculturalism on a visual level, the ceremony hostess—herself dressed in Mayan attire—nevertheless repeatedly highlighted those aspects that ‘unite us’ and that, for instance, ‘make us all Guatemalan’.

Fig. 2: ‘Presentación de Fragmento del Popol Vuh y Diálogo de los Dioses’, audiovisual projection, with music composed by Ranferí Aguilar. Video still from ‘Ceremonia del Bicentenario de Independecia’, uploaded by Gobierno de Guatemala on Facebook, 27 February, 2021

https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=935488793922565.

Visiting the Colección Poyón, or Indigeneityand the Nation-State in Guatemala

Indigeneity and the Nation-State The tension between diversity or plurality and homogeneity has accompanied the many narratives, as well as political measures, undertaken throughout the history of the Guatemalan Republic by its respective governors, and this tension is deeply rooted in the logic of colonial administration. In fact, instead of signifying the liberation of those subjugated under Spanish rule, the independence treaties set loose a political reconfiguration within a stillcolonial logic, as the concept of coloniality reaches beyond the occupation of a territory and its peoples after their ‘discovery’ and conquest.8 The figure of the ‘criollo/criolla’, a person of pure Spanish or European descent, is central here because of its protagonistic role during the treaties, in the years that followed, and even today. For instance, the conceptualization of the nation and the state as the private finca of the criollas/os remains a powerful one when describing contemporary Guatemala, already many decades after Severo Martínez Peláez’s famous study La Patria del criollo.9 Not only in Guatemala but also in many countries of the Americas, the foundational narrative of the criollo/a as simultaneously the liberator, ruler, and citizen of the new nation was to remain an ambiguous one, although it was precisely through this figure that the rapid consolidation of seemingly distinguishable nations could be achieved—on paper.10 Indigenous and Afro-diasporic peoples were to remain the ‘elephant in the room’ within national narratives. This is especially true for Guatemala, where indigenous communities form around

8

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10

See, for instance, Aníbal Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America’, Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–580. For a profound understanding of the Guatemalan nation and the state through time, see Arturo Taracena Arriola et al., Etnicidad, estado y nación en Guatemala, 2 vols., ¿Por qué estamos como estamos? (Antigua Guatemala: CIRMA, 2002, 2004). Severo Martínez Peláez, La patria del criollo: Ensayo de interpretación de la realidad colonial gatemalteca (Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria, 1970). See also Sergio Tischler Visquerra, ‘La forma finquera del Estado: Una aproximación al Estado liberal oligárquico guatemalteco’, Estudios 2 (1997): 108–135; Eva Kalny, Soziale Bewegungen in Guatemala: Eine kritische Theoriediskussion (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2017), 306–308. For a recent analysis, see Rigoberto Quemé Chay, ‘Una finca llamada Guatemala’, Plaza Pública, 12 May 2017, https://www.plazapublica.com.gt/content/una-finca-llamada-guatemala. See also Anderson, Imagined Communities, 47ff. Among other arguments, the author shows how the continuity of the colonial demarcation of territory under ‘criollo’ rule was responsible for such efficacy.

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half of the entire country’s population.11 Arturo Taracena Arriola and others have shown the different modalities officially adapted by the ruling class in relation to indigenous peoples, ranging from different forms of assimilationism, for example during the governments that followed the 1944 October Revolution against the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico, to segregationism, especially under that same dictatorship.12 Thus, one could say that the Guatemalan state has been alternating between, on the one hand, a somewhat missionary attitude of tutelage and education towards a ‘modern’ and Western model of Guatemalaness—assimilationism—and, on the other, an indifference towards cultural diversity, as long as there remains a hierarchy between cultures—segregationism. During the 1980s, the most bloody years of the Internal Armed Conflict that began in the early 1960s, the military governments of Lucas García and Efraín Ríos Montt adopted and applied a genocidal attitude towards indigenous peoples, targeting whole communities as communists or insurgents and therefore as enemies of the state, thus ‘legitimizing’ their extermination.13 After the peace agreements of 1996—yet another signing act—a process began that has been referred to as mayanización, meaning both the strong political organization of Mayan actors within and beyond state institutions as well as the adaptation of a multiculturalist rhetoric by the government, itself characterized by an under-representation of indigenous politicians and by its still-effective entanglement with the ‘criollo’ and ‘ladino’ elites.14 It was in the spirit of the peace agreements that the Ministry of Culture and Sports was consolidated with the explicit aim of representing the new, multicultural

11

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13 14

Diane Nelson, Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 40. According to the official census, by 2005, there were about 5,000 members of the Afro-diasporic Garifuna community in Guatemala; see Santiago Bastos, ‘La ideología multicultural en la Guatemala del cambio de milenio’, in Bastos and Cumes, Mayanización y vida cotidiana, vol. 1, 318. See Santiago Bastos, ‘Introducción: Multiculturalismo, mayanización y futuro’, in Multiculturalismo y futuro en Guatemala, ed. Santiago Bastos (Guatemala: FLACSO; Oxfam, 2008), 10–11; González Ponciano, ‘La visible invisibilidad’, 111–32. Marta Elena Casaús Arzú, Genocidio: ¿La máxima expresión del racismo en Guatemala? Cuadernos del presente imperfecto, vol. 4 (Guatemala: F&G Editores, 2008). Bastos and Cumes, ‘Introducción: Una investigación colectiva sobre etnicidad e ideologías’, 21–22; and Santiago Bastos, ‘La emergencia de los pueblos indígenas como actores políticos: Los mayas en Guatemala; La construcción de un actor y una acción política’, in Guatemala: Historia reciente, 1954–1996, vol. 3, Pueblos indígenas, actores políticos, ed. Virgilio Álvarez Aragón et al. (Guatemala: FLACSO, 2013), 79ff.

Visiting the Colección Poyón, or Indigeneityand the Nation-State in Guatemala

image of the postwar nation-state to both nationals and foreigners.15 Celebrations such as the Bicentenario are thus part of its institutional duties.

A Visit to the Colección Poyón

Fig. 3: Video still from the virtual tour around the Grand Tikal Futura Hotel, Ciudad de Guatemala, 2021.

https://www.grandtikalfutura.com

Another way of approaching the complex relation between the nation, the state, and indigeneity in Guatemala may be via specific objects that through their difference in media, materiality, and provenience speak of national narratives and state politics in a different register than, for instance, a book compilation like Arturo Taracena Arriola’s. Following this impulse, I would here like to ‘visit’ the Colección Poyón, bearing in mind that collections may function as institutions where objects are acquired, stored, categorized, and displayed—activities born out of the museum’s (trans)formation since late eigh-

15

Saríah Acevedo, ‘La transición incompleta entre la homogeneidad y la multiculturalidad en el Estado de Guatemala: El Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes’, in Mayanización y vida cotidiana: La ideología multicultural en la sociedad guatemalteca, vol. 2, Los estudios del caso, ed. Santiago Bastos and Aura Cumes (Guatemala: FLACSO; CIRMA; Cholsamaj, 2007), 17–18.

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teenth-century Europe.16 The Colección Poyón is not a conventional collection though. For the nineteenth edition of the Bienal de Arte Paiz in 2014,17 artists and brothers Ángel and Fernando Poyón decided to participate together as collectors: a concept that came to them while discussing their potential ideas for the Bienal with its curators in the cafeteria of Tikal Futura (fig. 3), a commercial centre and hotel located in Guatemala City and whose façade resembles the Mayan pyramids of the pre-Hispanic city or site of Tikal,18 in the northern department of the country.19 Built in a ‘neo-Mayan’ style,20 the architecture of Tikal Futura seems to aim at the formal communion between a precolonial past as the nation’s prehistory and today’s prevalent ‘modernization’ in the form of consumer capitalism. Ever since that 2014 biennial, the Poyóns have been welcoming donations and acquiring new objects, thus expanding their collection with pieces such as photographs of monuments and edifices, consumer goods, theory books and studies, touristic postcards and souvenirs, textiles and fashion magazines, film clips, and publicity banners—to name but a few. A collecting principle unifies this diverse array: the collectors gather different, indeed differing, ideas about Mayaness both past and present. The Colección Poyón’s display changes each time its objects are exhibited, highlighting some while hiding others. The objects are all stored at the artists’ studio in the Maya-Kaqchikel town of Chixot (also known as Comalapa), the space itself transforming into an exhibition room every time it welcomes not only curators and researchers but also possible donators. In the visit that follows, I will focus on eight objects that differ significantly from each other in terms of media and materiality but that, one after the other, point towards various modalities adopted by the state in its relation

16 17 18

19 20

See Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995). Anabella Acevedo, ed., Transvisible: 19 Bienal de Arte Paiz, exh. cat. (Guatemala: Fundación Paiz, 2014), 238–39. These places are commonly known as ‘sitios’, a term that evokes their history of ‘(re)discovery’ and maintenance by archaeologists and other scientists many centuries after being inhabited as cities. In what follows, I will draw on my personal communication with Ángel and Fernando Poyón, 31 March 2021. See Sandra Yolotzin Ixchel Racancoj Sac, ‘Análisis estilístico de la arquitectura y escultura neomaya del siglo XX en los cascos urbanos de Quetzaltenango, Chichicastenango, Totonicapán y San Marcos’ (arch. dipl., Arquitectura, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, 2015).

Visiting the Colección Poyón, or Indigeneityand the Nation-State in Guatemala

to Mayan peoples and the nation both historically and currently. I hope that these encounters help complicate national narratives and illuminate state politics, manifested as they are here in architecture, plastic, textiles, and anthropological as well as fashion photography.

Pyramids Painted Over

Fig. 4: Replica of the Gran Jaguar pyramid in Xetulul, Retalhuleu. Image Part of Ángel and Fernando Poyón’s Colección Poyón, 2014–.

Courtesy of the artists.

The first one is a photographed, architectural object: the one-to-one replica of El Gran Jaguar pyramid of Tikal (fig. 4), originally a ceremonial temple in the centre of the pre-Hispanic city and that today serves as a hallmark of Guatemalaness for both national and international tourists. Unlike the original temple though, the replica was already built as a seemingly inoperative edifice, a huge monument only to be photographed over and over again as the background of selfies and group photos taken by visitors to Xetulul, an extensive theme park opened in 2003 in the southwestern department of Retalhuleu, a four- to five-hour drive away from the capital.21 21

Jorge Murga Armas, ‘No lugares’ e identidad en Guatemala: Lo que está en juego en Xetulul (Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria USAC, 2008), 17ff., 32.

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This is a simultaneously replicated and modified ruin. Not only does its surface appear flat and its reliefs perfectly complete, it is also painted over in bright red and yellow. However, this is not to say that the replica is intended as a merely speculative version of the once-sacred temple. On the contrary, and as the state-funded institution behind the park proudly asserts on the basis of a rather thin investigation,22 the replica’s colours were inspired by the purported appearance of the Tikal pyramids before they were abandoned and eventually ‘rediscovered’. Becoming a double hallmark, namely of the theme park and—like the original temple—of Guatemala, the red-and-yellow replica maintains a complex relation both to pre-Hispanic cultures and to contemporary nationhood. Through its colour, it seems to claim a different kind of authenticity than the pyramid from the so-called late classic Mayan period in today’s archaeological site of Tikal.23 In its inutility as an architectural object, i.e. without interior spaces, it differs from ‘neo-Mayan’ buildings like Tikal Futura, which functions as a centre for commerce, lodging, and conventions, for instance. But what exactly is the painted pyramid there for? A look around the pyramid, as well as into the institution that brought it to life, is necessary in order to answer this question. Xetulul is in fact the most famous of several sites built and maintained by the Guatemalan Recreation Institute for Private Sector Workers, or IRTRA. Founded a few years after the 1954 coup d’état organized by the CIA that marked the end of the revolutionary project in Guatemala and the beginning of the state’s fight against insurgency, the institute was devoted to workers of private companies, who still maintain it via yearly contributions in the form of taxes.24 Used and administrated by the private sector, the IRTRA nevertheless benefits from the state apparatus and is tightly linked to the idealization of national citizenship. The most prominent spokesman for such tasks is Ricardo Castillo Sinibaldi, an acclaimed impresario with familial links to the oligarchy and who has led the institute for more than fifty years. Already in the 1980s, he dreamt about great parks that would go well beyond the then-existent sites, and he waited patiently to see his dream come true—this is how the institutional narrative

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IRTRA, ‘Interesante información, les compartimos un reportaje de nuestros amigos de Guatemala.com’, Facebook, 24 April 2017, https://www.facebook.com/irtrafanpage/pos ts/10155338880930921. Estuardo Torres, ‘Tikal’, Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes, accessed 29 November 2021, http://mcd.gob.gt/tikal/. Murga Armas, ‘No lugares’ e identidad en Guatemala, 10ff.

Visiting the Colección Poyón, or Indigeneityand the Nation-State in Guatemala

goes.25 Now back in Xetulul, the replica is located at the entrance of an area full of rides and different geographical themes: France, Italy, Germany, Spain, all countries of ‘great influence for the Guatemalan culture’.26 On the other side of the El Gran Jaguar replica, one finds the Guatemalan area, where colonial buildings from various parts of the country are equally reproduced, now serving as restaurants, as well as ticket and souvenir shops. Visible from a great distance in any direction, the colourful pyramid sticks out as the tallest, most massive construction of the park; it elevates Guatemala’s Mayan heritage above all the other ‘influences’ but also presents a very specific representation of such heritage, namely as undecipherable and thus disconnected from contemporary citizenship. The perfect reconstruction and painting over of the pyramid produces a monument that is as majestic as it is mysterious and, indeed, inaccessible. The history behind its colours may be an interesting fun fact, and the reliefs an enigma to be admired, albeit not resolved. After all, families and groups of friends visit the IRTRA parks with primarily one intention: to have fun—and I must say that I have had lots of it at them since I was a child. With the aim of entertainment, the national self is moulded out through performances in stage-like situations—here I am borrowing Diana Taylor’s vocabulary27 —but one could also cite from the decree that gave birth to the IRTRA in 1962 with the task ‘to organize an active and effective propaganda campaign to educate public opinion in favour of the proper use of workers’ leisure time.28 During the postwar era then, the replica of Tikal’s Gran Jaguar has played a (per)formative role on visitors who both fund and profit from the IRTRA’s theme parks and sites.

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Murga Armas points rightly to the fact that the president’s dreams took place in an especially bloody time during war; Murga Armas, ‘No lugares’ e identidad en Guatemala, 14–15. Cited from the IRTRA administration in Murga Armas, ‘No lugares’ e identidad en Guatemala, 31. She uses this vocabulary to describe, among other things, the spectacular dimension of Juan Perón’s regime in Argentina, fuelled by his wife and actress Eva Perón and perpetuated in numerous cultural manifestations after her death; Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 44ff. Cited in Murga Armas, ‘No lugares’ e identidad en Guatemala, 12.

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Undecipherable Plastic

Fig. 5: Ángel and Fernando Poyón, Colección Poyón, 2014–, installation view from Transvisible: 19 Bienal de Arte Paiz, Ciudad de Guatemala, 2014.

Photograph by Byron Mármol, courtesy of the artists.

The next four objects are similar to each other, although each of them has its own purpose: the green and blue ones are for everyone’s beverage and the yellow and orange ones are for individual use only (fig. 5). These objects are rare, despite the fact that they circulate every day in towns like Chixot, where they are bought and sold at low prices. On the one hand, they are thin and light, with bright colours, resistant as only plastic can be. On the other, these vessels appear to be carved depicting somewhat anthropomorphic figures in the style of pre-Hispanic ‘heiroglyphs’, usually carved onto stone. In other words: these are industrially produced light objects in the style of heavy remnants from an ancient Mayan past that is partly accessible in archaeological sites and museums throughout the country. A similar ambiguity inhabits the Xetulul replica, but unlike the pyramid, these objects do have a direct,

Visiting the Colección Poyón, or Indigeneityand the Nation-State in Guatemala

practical use. In fact, their primary purpose seems to be practical in nature: to reserve and pour water and other liquids—maybe even beer, in the case of the yellow one. Why this pre-Hispanic motif though? How do these representations change the consumption of—and in—these vases and cups? Even more importantly: What do the pseudo-carvings mean? Not only the motif but also the very materiality of the objects is important here. Indeed, and as artist Benvenuto Chavajay has shown in the case of the town of San Pedro La Laguna, the introduction of plastic into many Mayan communities radically changed everyday customs and interactions.29 Moreover, it has already become, alongside metal and concrete, a signifier of the forced, unidirectional modernization that began in the twentieth century, from Guatemala City to what is often referred to as the country’s ‘interior.’30 During wartime and then afterward, plastic came to replace clay, dramatically changing the production techniques and even the use of objects by many communities—an observation that Ángel and Fernando Poyón share with Chavajay from their Chixot experience.31 Nevertheless, and here comes the reason why these objects qualify for the Colección, they are decorated with reliefs that evoke pre-Hispanic Mayan stelae and other carved stones. Instead of being produced with ancient techniques and materials that demand a specific use, these objects’ Mayaness seems to rest on what is represented on, and indeed by, their surfaces—moulded as they are with preconceived models—and especially on the associations that these may evoke. The collectors could not find out what these supposed ‘hieroglyphs’ may refer to; in fact, after some research they rather concluded that the figures most probably mean nothing. The appropriation of pre-Hispanic visual elements in terms of style is reminiscent of the definition of ‘neo-Mayan’ architecture proposed in the study consulted above.32 So in a way, these vessels are exemplars of ‘neo-Mayan’ industrial design. This is not to say that buildings like Tikal Futura and vases 29

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In what follows, I will draw on Benvenuto Chavajay, ‘De la polarización, otros viajes y el re-torno’, in Repensarnos: Guatemala 2012; capital mundial de la filosofía, ed. Juan Blanco et al. (Guatemala: Universidad Rafael Landívar, 2011), 81ff. For a critique of this terminology, see Emma Delfina Chirix García, ‘Construimos la memoria para continuar valorando la vida’, PúblicoGT, 27 June 2018, https://publicog t.com/2018/06/27/construimos-la-memoria-para-continuar-valorando-la-vida/. In what follows, I will draw on my personal communication with Ángel and Fernando Poyón, 31 March 2021. Yolotzin Ixchel Racancoj Sac, ‘Análisis estilístico de la arquitectura y escultura neomaya del siglo XX’, 80.

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or cups like these two do not have the potential to communicate something beyond hidden messages to be deciphered through code-learning—as in the case of the ‘hieroglyphic sign system’ of the Maya, which is impossible to apply here. Indeed, and as Diane Nelson has shown in her account of participating in a ‘hieroglyphs’ workshop in Guatemala, the process of acquiring knowledge of the pre-Hispanic past is as equally cognitive as it is affective.33 This is especially true for those who today identify as Mayan, some of whom narrated to Nelson the experience of feeling knowledge entering the body both through deciphering as well as via a material and spiritual encounter with the stones. So like the Xetulul pyramid, the plastic vase and cup still carry the possibility to transmit ancient knowledge through their form and beyond their—likely impossible—decipherability. In fact, the green and blue vessels also resemble local clay vases where water is still purified, albeit only rarely. Last year, Fernando showed me one of those.

Death-Sentencing Textiles The sixth object is once again a photograph (fig. 6), although it shows a very different setting than that of the painted pyramid. Dressed in military uniforms, with their hats on the table and their guns on the floor near their feet, five men are sitting in a line in what seems to be a classroom. The gaze of at least two of them is directed towards a large piece of cloth that is extended by another, standing, military man, and the fabric has red, yellow, and purple stripes, as well as bird motifs, woven through it. The exhibited photograph is part of the famous study and photographic essay Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny,34 published in 1987 by Jean-Marie Simon, that narrates social disparities and guerrilla conviviality as well as the horrors of genocide and repression during the 1970s and 1980s. It does so with testimonies, reports, and photographs like this one, which the author herself took. In terms of historical memory, Simon’s book has been an important publication that, in a

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I am using the term affect to hint at what is ‘transmitted below the threshold of conscious perception, manifesting as bodily tension and relaxation’; in Bettina Papenburg, ‘Affect’, in Symptoms of the Planetary Condition: A Critical Vocabulary, ed. Mercedes Bunz et al. (Lüneburg: Meson, 2017), 19. Jean-Marie Simon, Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny (London: Norton, 1987), 125.

Visiting the Colección Poyón, or Indigeneityand the Nation-State in Guatemala

sense, complements the official reports published in 1999 by the Commission for Historical Clarification, itself instituted in the context of the 1996 peace accords with the task to illuminate objectively and in detail the human rights violations during the war. Unlike the report, Simon’s book not only gives factual information about the atrocities but also shows them from both their brutal and most sensitive sides, allowing and indeed asking for an emotional engagement with what happened to so many people. With at times simplistic or generalizing formulations, direct citations of the extremely violent language that, for instance, the state used, and photographic records of tortured bodies and militarized children, Guatemala is read as a scream against indifference, especially that of the US politicians and general public that the author openly denounces. At first glance though, the photograph collected by the Poyóns does not seem to show violence explicitly. The text beneath it, as well as on the page before it, do: these are military men learning to distinguish the patterns of different huipiles, or traditional blouses, that pertain to different communities, in order to recognize their target better. They are learning how to identify the enemy.

Fig. 6: Ángel and Fernando Poyón, Colección Poyón, 2014–, installation view from This Might be a Place for Hummingbirds, Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin, 2019/2020.

Photograph (detail) by Benjamin Renter.

It is via practices like this that the genocidal character of the state’s manoeuvres at that time becomes clear, and even the fact that what happened was indeed a genocide becomes indisputable, meaning, among other things,

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that the systematic state violence was directed against an ethnic or cultural group—something Marta Elena Casaús Arzú has dealt with in detail.35 In Genocidio: ¿La máxima expresión del racismo en Guatemala?, she reconstructs the historical ground that allowed for the emergence of these human rights violations. Her argument is that these acts, committed under the military rule of Lucas García and Efraín Ríos Montt, were not isolated and exceptional but indeed emerged out of a history of racism originated in the colony and perpetuated under various forms of governance after Guatemalan independence, finding its ‘maximal expression’ in the genocide against Mayan peoples. The relation between racism and the nation-state is critical in Casaús Arzú’s argument; following Michel Foucault,36 she characterizes it as one of interdependency. From its very constitution, the structure of the state is essentially racist in that it self-ascribes the legitimacy to kill the Other in the name of sovereignty—so argues Casaús Arzú further. In Guatemala, the military and paramilitary units successfully massacred, tortured, and disappeared not only organized insurgency groups but members of Mayan peoples whom they often referred to as ‘the enemies of the state’; this was a ‘success’ to be measured in numbers: more than 200,000 dead, of which 83 percent were indigenous.37 Here, the Other of the state does not lie outside its own territory, but within. Moreover, it was in the name of the nation-state that diverse, powerful sectors could unite against their common enemies, meaning all those who would dare disturb the nation’s ‘imaginary’—a term used by Casaús Arzú and reminiscent of Benedict Anderson’s terminology cited above. So-called scorched earth tactics were applied, whereby whole villages, including their inhabitants, were burned to ashes. Implicit here is the fact that these tactics, instead of solely taking place behind the backs of non-involved citizens, had rather a formative function on them—one comparable to the context of the Argentinian Dirty War described by Diana Taylor.38 Specifically, Taylor discusses how abductions, as well as further disappearances of ‘insurgents’ by the state, were staged in the middle of the day and in front of an audience of citizens, thus having an instructive effect. To be made into ‘exemplary’ Argentinians, those watching these acts would learn the importance of suppressing any insurgent

35 36 37 38

In what follows, I will refer to Casaús Arzú, Genocidio, 11ff., 54ff. The author consults Michel Foucault, Genealogía del racismo, trans. Alfredo Tzveibely (Madrid: La Picota, 1992). Nelson, Who Counts?, 40. Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 91ff.

Visiting the Colección Poyón, or Indigeneityand the Nation-State in Guatemala

tendencies they might have, because if they didn’t, they would be risking their lives. In Guatemala, the ‘state enemies’ were likewise disappeared and thus erased from the national narrative.39 Again, and according to Casaús Arzú, these disappearances and killings were not isolated, but were grounded historically and on coeval ideas about ‘Indians’, as articulated by members of the ‘ladino’ and ‘criollo’ elites. In Genocidio, Casaús Arzú explores the expressions of two modalities that are simultaneously at stake during the genocide, and that are equally present in Arturo Taracena Arriola’s compilation cited above: segregationism and—I would say radical—assimilationism. On the one hand, there were state policies, such as the so-called model villages, that aimed at the control and separation of indigenous groups. On the other, the aim of exterminating all ‘Indians’ was seen, among other things, as the only true possibility for their full integration. At the core between these seemingly incompatible attitudes lies a paradox that has accompanied the ‘criollos/as’ from the very beginning when imagining a nation shared with indigenous as well as Afro-diasporic and ‘mestizo’ populations, either in Guatemala or beyond.40 Acquired by and stored in the Colección Poyón, Jean-Marie Simon’s photograph shows the way in which the military learned to identify indigenous peoples, namely via their dress, thus acquiring a knowledge of textiles that would lead to many human rights violations conducted in the name of the nation and under state supervision. Here, the gender dimension of the genocide becomes clear due to the fact that women are both the primary weavers and wearers of Mayan textiles.41 One page before this photo appears in Simon’s book, the author narrates how women ceased to wear their Mayan attire in order not to be identified as members of a community targeted by the military, something also Morna Macleod has dealt with through her interviewing method.42 However, Macleod also cites women who kept using their Mayan clothes, either because they felt so attached to them, or as an act of self-determination, or both. In any case, and as Diane Nelson has discussed at length,43

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In what follows, I will refer to Casaús Arzú, Genocidio, 54ff. Again, see Anderson, Imagined Communities, 47ff. For an account of systematic rape and other such practices during genocide, see Casaús Arzú, Genocidio, 61ff. Morna Macleod, Nietas del fuego, creadoras del alba: Luchas político-culturales de mujeres mayas (Guatemala: FLACSO, 2011), 95–101. Diane Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 170ff.

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it is through her clothing that the figure of the Mayan woman became so central for nationalistic as well as Mayanist narratives, textile becoming ‘almost isomorphic with the Mayan woman who weaves it and wears it.’44 In other words: the variety of colourful and highly complex—both in terms of technique and meaning45 —Mayan textiles has changed from being the signifier of a nation-state’s enemy to that of the multicultural ‘patria’ to be proud of. What is more: textile may fulfil both functions at the same time.

Fashionable Tutelage

Fig. 7: Front cover of Look Magazine, July 2017.

uploaded on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/lookmaga zinegt/posts/1712497212126261

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Nelson, A Finger in the Wound, 171. For an introduction into the many dimensions of Mayan textiles, see Barbara Tedlock and Dennis Tedlock, ‘Text and Textile: Language and Technology in the Art of the Maya Quiché’, Journal of Anthropological Research 41, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 121–46; and also Irma Otzoy, Maya’ b’anikil maya’ tzyaqb’äl / Identidad y vestuario maya (Guatemala: Cholsamaj, 1996).

Visiting the Colección Poyón, or Indigeneityand the Nation-State in Guatemala

Fig. 8: Ángel and Fernando Poyón, Colección Poyón, 2014–, installation view from This Might be a Place for Hummingbirds, Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin, 2019/2020.

Photograph by Benjamin Renter.

Collected by the Poyón brothers, the seventh object is probably the most famous front cover of the Guatemalan fashion magazine Look, which was issued in July 2017 and rapidly changed after a shitstorm of criticism on the publication’s Facebook page (figs. 7, 8). It depicts a female model wearing a long, green, flowered dress in a public square in Antigua Guatemala, once a colonial administrative centre and now one of the country’s most visited sites by tourists. Apparently looking at the sky, the model—entrepreneur Francesca Kennedy—does not seem to notice the rest of the photographed subjects behind her: three women and two children, the former wearing indigenous attire and carrying other such textiles and accessories on their heads and in their arms. These Mayan women are caught by the camera, accompanied by children whom they are taking care of while selling their products to tourists. Their difference to the model in the foreground seems enormous, an impression highlighted not only through the model’s distracted gaze, but by means of lightning, editing, and dress; Kennedy seems much thinner, taller, and, simply, much whiter than the rest. So here, i.e. in a postcolonial setting, differences in terms of physical characteristics and dress seem overemphasized. Yet a closer look reveals that also the protagonist is wearing a thin piece of cloth woven with indigenous techniques; it hangs from her left shoulder, reaching

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down to her knees. Perhaps it is a ‘cinta’, actually meant to be worn on the head. But does it really matter? It seems quite reasonable to state that Francesca Kennedy’s and Look’s attitude is one of cultural appropriation, a concept present in many contemporary debates as well as in the comments below both Facebook posts—of the original cover and the apologetic statement. In this, the model appropriates but one element of Mayan dress and uses it as an accessory, emptied of meaning and context. Many Facebook users also point at the visibility but lack of agency of the Mayan women—their names are not published on the front cover, for example—and the commentors speculate about the women’s surely non-existent payment as models. However, what interests me most is, again, the role of the nation-state, appearing here and there throughout the whole magazine. Already on the front cover, one reads: ‘Changing Guatemala through artisanal fashion’, followed by ‘Guatemala through foreign eyes’, a sentence that fully covers the next two pages. Interestingly, Kennedy’s section builds the core of an issue dedicated to non-Guatemalans who maintain a relation to the country and ‘change it for the better’—a relation of tutelage, no doubt. Yet in the article dedicated to her,46 Kennedy herself emphasizes that although she was born in the US, she truly is Guatemalan—with an ID card and all! It is in this nationalistic spirit that she organizes celebrity trips to Antigua Guatemala and Lake Atitlan, so that ‘our country becomes even more touristic than Costa Rica’.47 After the scandal around the cover, also the Look team felt the need to turn to their ‘100% Guatemalaness’ in order to prove their good intentions.48 Thus, the critique of the magazine’s and the model’s open display of race and class disparities in terms of posing, lightning, dress, and editing was rapidly countered with references to the paper’s commitment to ‘our dearest country’— a manoeuvre anticipated by Kennedy in her article. Unlike national self-formations during the genocide not too long ago,49 here, the nation is imagined and celebrated as multicultural, in a narrative shared and promoted by the postwar state, as dealt with in regard

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‘View: Francesca Kennedy’, Look Magazine, July 2017, 43–50. ‘View: Francesca Kennedy’, 46. Look Magazine, ‘Comunicado’. For an analysis of the massacres as disciplinary practices in terms of nation-building, see Edgar Esquit, ‘Disciplinando al subalterno: Vínculos de violencia y de gobierno en Guatemala’, in Multiculturalismo y futuro en Guatemala, ed. Santiago Bastos (Guatemala: FLACSO; Oxfam; 2008), 130ff.

Visiting the Colección Poyón, or Indigeneityand the Nation-State in Guatemala

to the Bicentenario. Nevertheless, uniting this and Jean-Marie Simon’s photograph lays out the fact that in both cases, nationhood is represented and debated deploying textiles woven and worn by Mayan women—the Guatemalan marker par excellence according to Diane Nelson, quoted above. The touristic usage of Mayan textiles by both the private sector and the state has led to Mayan weavers organizing and fighting together for the recognition of their communities’ intellectual property over their designs, as well as for a better national self-representation. Recently, they have achieved success in court: the state-funded Guatemalan Institute for Tourism is now obliged to consult with Mayan organizations when applying public policies and involve them in campaigns that have an effect on them—a victory against what these organizations refer to as ‘a big monster’: the state.50

The Mayan Wardrobe of the State Now arriving at the end of this visit, and due to the rather thin information provided about the provenience of the eighth and final object, it is time to deal with some last questions that threaten to complicate the relation between indigeneity and the nation-state even more. For the first time, there is an actual piece of cloth, draped from a hanger (fig. 9). Also this object seems rare and unusual: a black suit with colourful lapels and collar, the latter two elements woven with indigenous techniques. Before finding its way into the collection, it had belonged to a Mayan politician—perhaps even a congressman? So it can be speculated that unlike the documentary and fashion photographs of Mayan textiles, this is a piece designed for a man who is neither targeted by the state’s tactics nor appropriating elements of a culture that is not his own. In other words: having a Mayan heritage that he emphasizes through his clothes, this public employee plays a very different role in relation to the nation-state than the role played, for instance, by Francesca Kennedy on the cover of Look, or by the military men photographed by Jean-Marie Simon during the 1980s. This man is now part of the state apparatus in the era of ‘mayanización’.

50

Leonarda Dionicio cited in Kimberly Rocío López, ‘Mujeres tejedoras: Afuera somos exóticas, acá las “Marías”’, Plaza Pública, 16 January 2021, https://www.plazapublica.co m.gt/content/mujeres-tejedoras-afuera-somos-exoticas-aca-las-marias.

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Fig. 9: Ángel and Fernando Poyón, Colección Poyón, 2014–, installation view from This Might be a Place for Hummingbirds, Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin, 2019/2020.

Photograph by Benjamin Renter.

But what are the conditions and consequences of such expressions of Mayaness performed by the state, or rather, by Mayan actors within state institutions? This is a question that could be dealt with in historical terms, recognizing, for example, that the very acceptance of the term ‘Maya’ by the state resulted out of a long history of indigenous struggles and organizations before and after the 1996 peace agreements.51 Nevertheless, a quick look into the current situation of the institutions founded in this spirit is already sufficient to recognize the failure of a modality of ‘mayanización’ that comes from and depends on the state: many of these initiatives lack the basic funding and support to fulfil their functions.52 Moreover, and as Santiago Bastos among others has shown, multiculturalism sometimes serves as a ‘cosmetic’ practice, 51 52

Santiago Bastos, ‘Construcción de la identidad maya como un proceso político’, in Bastos and Cumes, Mayanización y vida cotidiana vol. 1, 55ff. Santiago Bastos, ‘La emergencia de los pueblos indígenas como actores políticos’, 80ff.

Visiting the Colección Poyón, or Indigeneityand the Nation-State in Guatemala

merely affecting the image of the nation without changing the state’s structure.53 To say that the congressman’s suit functions as cosmetic would be to say that the Mayan politician does as well: through his clothes, he himself becomes the signifier of the multicultural nation-state, and indeed, its very costume. Unlike the Mayan women in the Look cover, however, the dressed-up congressman also becomes the signifier of indigenous adaptation, Mayaness being but a decorative addition to his otherwise Western suit. But this interpretation is incomplete; it does not take into account the success of so many Mayan initiatives and actors during the last centuries, including those acting from within state institutions.54 Thus, the tension between the nation-state and Mayaness remains unresolved, however reconfigured.

Collecting as a Way of Seeing55 The objects in the Colección Poyón themselves do not seem to provide definitive answers, although it has been the encounter with them, one after the other, that has led me to formulate questions in the first place. Throughout the last pages, I have emulated a visit that could have taken place in the artist’s studio in Chixot, or in the context of an exhibition like the one held two years ago in Berlin,56 where a specific selection of objects was displayed alongside a wall text, but with nothing more. In fact, and as the curators from the very first presentation during the Bienal de Arte Paiz rightly suggest, the objects’

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Bastos, ‘Construcción de la identidad maya’, 73. Also: Santiago Bastos, ‘La ideología multicultural en la Guatemala del cambio de milenio’, 353. Here, I am also reminded of the figure of the coin in theories of decoloniality that deal with the complementary relation between, on the one hand, the rhetoric of modernity and, on the other, the logic of coloniality; see, for instance, Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality’, in Globalization and the Decolonial Option, ed. Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (London: Routledge, 2010), 317ff. See Álvarez Aragón et al., Guatemala: Historia reciente. I am borrowing this formulation from Svetlana Alpers, ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’, in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 25–32. The exhibition This Might Be a Place for Hummingbirds was curated by Çağla Ilk and Antje Weitzel and shown at the Galerie im Körnerpark between 16 November 2019 and 5 February 2020.

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ordering resembles that of a ‘cabinet of curiosities’,57 literally making visitors curious about the historical and cultural contexts, materialities, and techniques or media of every one of these diverse objects that can be both rare and remarkably common. Thus, the Colección seems to do something similar to what Svetlana Alpers points out regarding (European) museums, namely, the action of reorienting the visitor’s attention, and indeed to produce a specific ‘way of seeing’ the exhibits through their hanging, lightning, and other such techniques.58 But unlike Alpers’s hierarchization of paintings and artefacts based on what she calls ‘visual interest’, the Poyóns’ collecting principle rather seems to be as open as it gets: they welcome and expose everything that their donators might feel says something about Mayaness—or so it seems.59 This practice awakens the feeling that there are still many potential exhibits out there, meaning both in Guatemala and beyond. What is more: the collection of the everyday invites visitors to imagine doing the same. Paraphrasing Alpers again, I want to say that this collecting effect indeed produces a specific way of seeing that operates not only inside the exhibition space but also outside of it, in everyday life. It is precisely on this aspect that the conceptual nature of the Colección is grounded. Yet through this emulated visit to the Colección, I also had a specific purpose in mind: to find articulations of the nation-state that would illuminate, as well as complicate, the various modalities that both national narratives and state policies have adapted throughout the last two hundred years in relation to indigenous peoples in Guatemala. Contrary to reading a book, however, these modalities came up all at once, or at least one after—or spatially, next to—the other. And they came differently manifested. So my focus has shifted from contextual information, provided mainly by studies from social sciences, to the objects’ material and medial dimensions, and back. It is this wandering that has shed light on the relevance of what I have been calling ‘sites’: the colonial city, the archaeological site, the theme park. Most of them administrated by the state, they become stage-like scenarios where performances of nationhood take place. Moreover, the production and deployment of specific mate-

57 58 59

Acevedo, Transvisible, 238. Alpers, ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’, 25ff. I was surprised by the artists’ acceptance and rapid exhibition of my own donations: a bottle of Maya Mate and a package of Maya Tabak. Needless to say, the array of objects on display is by no means accidental; on the contrary, the balance between different materialities and media allows for diverse walkthroughs.

Visiting the Colección Poyón, or Indigeneityand the Nation-State in Guatemala

rialities, such as plastic, and especially Mayan textiles, has been central for highly contradictory claims and projections of Guatemalaness, for instance, as a nation of segregated or assimilated ‘Indians’ or as deeply multicultural. One thing has become more clear throughout the visit, and I hope here not to disrespect each historical period’s specificity: national and state modalities as differing as segregation, assimilation, tutelage, and multiculturalism may all be manifested within the same period, and even in the same object. Situated along the axis of diversity or plurality on the one hand and homogeneity on the other, their paradoxical, i.e. unresolvable relation lies at the heart of the foundation of many nations by the ‘criollos/as’ throughout the Americas. In Guatemala, it perpetuates social hierarchies, thus keeping colonial legacies still alive today.

Bibliography Acevedo, Anabella, ed. Transvisible: 19 Bienal de Arte Paiz. Guatemala: Fundación Paiz, 2014. Exhibition catalogue. Acevedo, Saríah. ‘La transición incompleta entre la homogeneidad y la multiculturalidad en el Estado de Guatemala: El Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes’. In Mayanización y vida cotidiana: La ideología multicultural en la sociedad guatemalteca. Vol. 2, Los estudios del caso, edited by Santiago Bastos and Aura Cumes, 9–44. Guatemala: FLACSO; CIRMA; Cholsamaj, 2007. Alpers, Svetlana. ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’. In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, 26–32. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. Álvarez Aragón, Virgilio, et al., eds., Guatemala: Historia reciente (1954–1996). Vol. 3, Pueblos indígenas, actores políticos. Guatemala: FLACSO, 2013. Alvizures, Andrea. ‘Presidente Alejandro Giammattei encendió el “Fuego de la Libertad”’. Radio TGW, 27 February 2021. https://radiotgw.gob.gt/presid ente-alejandro-giammattei-encendio-el-fuego-de-la-libertad/. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Bastos, Santiago. ‘Construcción de la identidad maya como un proceso político’. In Bastos and Cumes, Mayanización y vida cotidiana, vol. 1, 53–80. Bastos, Santiago. ‘Introducción: Multiculturalismo, mayanización y futuro’. In Multiculturalismo y futuro en Guatemala, edited by Santiago Bastos, 9–22. Guatemala: FLACSO; Oxfam, 2008.

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Bastos, Santiago. ‘La emergencia de los pueblos indígenas como actores políticos: Los mayas en Guatemala; La construcción de un actor y una acción política’. In Álvarez Aragón et al., Guatemala: Historia reciente, 59–93. Bastos, Santiago. ‘La ideología multicultural en la Guatemala del cambio de milenio’. In Bastos and Cumes, Mayanización y vida cotidiana, vol. 1, 211–373. Bastos, Santiago, and Aura Cumes, eds., Mayanización y vida cotidiana: La ideología multicultural en la sociedad guatemalteca. Vol. 1, Introducción y análisis generales. Guatemala: FLACSO; CIRMA; Cholsamaj, 2007. Bastos, Santiago, and Aura Cumes. ‘Introducción: Una investigación colectiva sobre etnicidad e ideologías’. In Bastos and Cumes, Mayanización y vida cotidiana, vol. 1, 9–52. Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. New York: Routledge, 1995. Casaús Arzú, Marta Elena. Genocidio: ¿La máxima expresión del racismo en Guatemala? Cuadernos del Presente Imperfecto, vol. 4. Guatemala: F&G Editores, 2008. Chavajay, Benvenuto. ‘De la polarización, otros viajes y el re-torno’. In Repensarnos: Guatemala 2012; capital mundial de la filosof ía, edited by Juan Blanco et al., 81–85. Guatemala: Universidad Rafael Landívar, 2011. Chirix García, Emma Delfina, ‘Construimos la memoria para continuar valorando la vida’. PublicoGT, 27 June 2018. https://publicogt.com/2018/06/27/ construimos-la-memoria-para-continuar-valorando-la-vida/. Dym, Jordana. ‘Actas de independencia: De la Capitanía General de Guatemala a la República Federal de Centroamérica’. In Independencias, estados y política(s) en a Centroamérica del siglo XIX: Las huellas históricas del bicentenario, edited by David Díaz Arias and Ronny Viales Hurtado, 3–24. San José: CIHAC, 2012. Esquit, Edgar. ‘Disciplinando al subalterno: Vínculos de violencia y de gobierno en Guatemala’. In Multiculturalismo y futuro en Guatemala, edited by Santiago Bastos, 123–48. Guatemala: FLACSO; Oxfam, 2008. Foucault, Michel. Genealogía del racismo. Translated by Alfredo Tzveibely. Madrid: La Picota, 1992. Gobierno de Guatemala. ‘Ceremonia del Bicentenario de Independencia’. Facebook, 27 February 2021. https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=9 35488793922565&ref=watch. González Ponciano, Jorge Ramón. ‘La visible invisibilidad de la blancura y el ladino como no blanco en Guatemala’. In Memorias del mestizaje: Cultura

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Contributors

Stanislas Spero Adotevi studied philosophy in Paris, where he received a doctorate in anthropology, and has worked as a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris VII. He has also served as Benin’s Minister of Information and Minister of Culture, as Cabinet Director for the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Youth and Sports, as Director of the National Archives and Museums, and as Regional Director of the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Dakar. He was elected Regional Director of UNICEF for West and Central Africa, and as Special Advisor to the Executive Director of UNICEF in New York. Now retired, he has lived in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso since 1997. Alongside numerous articles, he has authored Négritude et négrologues (1970) and De Gaulle et les Africains (2004). Sebastián Eduardo Dávila studied art history and film studies in Jena, Berlin, and Mexico City. The title of his PhD project is ‘The Decolonial Turn in Contemporary Art Practices and Terminology in Postwar Guatemala: An Art History of Delinking’ (Leuphana University Lüneburg). He has published articles, reviews, and interviews in Miradas, re:visions, Academia XXII, Revista Poiésis, insurgencias.net, and Lateinamerika Nachrichten and written for the exhibitions UP IN ARMS and This might be a place for humming birds. He was a speaker at the Interdisziplinärer Niedersächsischer Doktorand_innentag ‘Gender Studies’ (Lüneburg, 2020), the Seeing More Queerly in the 21st Century conference (Miami, 2020), and the Kunsthistorischer Studienkongress (Leipzig, 2016). He is part of the VOCES de Guatemala en Berlín collective. Natasha Ginwala is an associate curator at Gropius Bau, Berlin, and the artistic director of the interdisciplinary arts festival COLOMBOSCOPE in Sri Lanka and, with Defne Ayas, of the 13th Gwangju Biennale. Ginwala has curated Contour Biennale 8, ‘Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium’, and

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was part of the curatorial team of documenta 14 in 2017. Her recent projects include the ‘Sea Change’ edition of COLOMBOSCOPE (2019); Arrival, Incision: Indian Modernism as Peripatetic Itinerary in the framework of Hello World: Revising a Collection at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof—Museum für Gegenwart (2018); Riots: Slow Cancellation of the Future at ifa-Galerie Berlin and Stuttgart (2018); My East Is Your West at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015); and Corruption: Everybody Knows … with e-flux, New York (2015). Ginwala was a member of the artistic team for the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2014) and has co-curated The Museum of Rhythm at the Taipei Biennial 2012 and at Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2016–2017. Ginwala writes on contemporary art and visual culture in various periodicals and has contributed to numerous publications. She is a recipient of the 2018 visual arts research grant from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe. Monica Hanna is an associate professor and acting dean at the College of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage of the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport (Aswan Campus). Her research focuses on space, knowledge, and identity of archaeological sites, with a particular interest on different meanings and reflections of heritage regarding identity of space and communities. Her current research focuses on decolonizing and democratizing archaeology, as well as repatriation and restitution amongst methods for improving accessibility for the wider public to archaeology and heritage, with an emphasis on the digital humanities. Since 2011, Hanna has been working with the media and a group of volunteers to bring awareness to the plight of various archaeological sites in Egypt, especially Dahshur, Abu Sir el-Maleq, and ancient Heliopolis. Hanna has been granted numerous awards including the SAFE Beacon Award for 2014 for her efforts in the salvage of antiquities under conflict and was named the Monuments Woman of 2014 by UNESCO. In 2021, she was named one of the fifty most influential women in Egypt. Rajkamal Kahlon is a South Asian American artist based in Berlin whose work draws on legacies of colonialism, often using the material culture, documentary material, and aesthetics of Western colonial archives. She holds an MFA from the California College of the Arts, where she was a senior lecturer in fine arts, and a BA from the University of California, Davis. She also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Whitney Independent Study Program. Since 2021 she has been a professor for painting and drawing at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK). Her work has been shown in-

Contributors

ternationally at the Queens Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Taipei Biennial, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and more. In October 2021 she had a twenty-year survey show at the University Library Gallery at Sacramento State. Suzana Milevska is a theorist and curator of visual art and culture based in Macedonia. At the Politecnico di Milano, Milevska was the principal investigator for the Horizon 2020 project TRACES (2016–2019). Before that, she was the first Endowed Professor for Central and South Eastern European Art Histories at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her research and curatorial projects are based on the urgent need for a postcolonial critique of hegemonic power regimes’ institutional representations of marginalized communities; this work has included furthering feminist, participatory, and collaborative artistic practices and art projects by artists of Roma background. Milevska holds a PhD in visual culture from Goldsmiths College, London. She was awarded a Fulbright Senior Research Scholarship, the ALICE Award for Political Curating, and the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory. Mirjam Shatanawi is a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam and Reinwardt Academy and a researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Her current work focuses on colonial histories of Islamic material culture from Indonesia and, in particular, their representation in museums. Between 2001 and 2018, she worked as a curator at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, the Afrika Museum near Nijmegen, and the Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam. She is the author of Islam at the Tropenmuseum (LM Publishers, 2014) and co-editor of Islam and Heritage in Europe: Pasts, Presents and Future Possibilities (Routledge, 2021). Kavita Singh is a professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, where she teaches courses in the history of Indian painting, particularly the Mughal and Rajput schools, and in the history and politics of museums. Singh has published on secularism and religiosity, fraught national identities, and the memorialization of difficult histories as they relate to museums in South Asia and beyond. She has also published essays and monographs on aspects of Mughal and Rajput painting, especially on style as a signifying system. Singh was awarded the Infosys Prize in Human-

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ities in 2018 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020. Ruth Stamm studied art history, history, and culture, arts, and media in Hamburg and Lüneburg. In her master’s thesis she discussed Rajkamal Kahlon’s series Die Völker der Erde (People of the Earth) as a restitutive practice. Building on her work as a student assistant in the Photography and New Media Collection at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg and for the Chair of Contemporary Art at Leuphana University Lüneburg, she is particularly interested in the interface between practical museum work and theoretical engagement with museum collections—especially with regard to the genre of photography, the discussion of colonial heritage and restitution, and the possibilities of exhibition-making today. She currently works as a freelance art educator for photography exhibitions in Hamburg. Andrea Witcomb is a professor of cultural heritage and museum studies at Deakin University in Australia. She is well known for her book Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (Routledge, 2003), multiple book chapters and journal articles, and Museum Theory (Wiley and Sons, 2015), which she co-edited with Kylie Message as part of Sharon Macdonald’s and Helen Rees Leahy’s The International Handbooks of Museum Studies series. Her work looks at the representation of cultural diversity and migration in museums, as well as at interactivity and the uses of multimedia in exhibitions, and is increasingly focused on the possibilities offered by affective forms of interpretation for staging reflexive forms of engagement with difficult pasts. This work—including the chapter presented here—has been supported by research funding from the Australian Research Council. Her latest research project, funded by the ARC, takes her into the history of collecting practices in Western Australia as a lens on relations between collecting, histories of empire, colonialism, cross-cultural encounters on the frontier, and the making of a sense of place.

Museum Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer, Raphael Schwere (eds.)

Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe A New Field for Museum Studies 2018, 272 p., pb. 34,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4381-7 E-Book: 34,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4381-1

Wolfgang Schneider, Beate Kegler, Daniela Koß (eds./Hg.)

Vital Village Development of Rural Areas as a Challenge for Cultural Policy / Entwicklung ländlicher Räume als kulturpolitische Herausforderung 2017, 380 p., pb., col. ill. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3988-9 E-Book: 26,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3988-3

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