GESTURES OF (RE)PAIR: TOWARDS A MUSEUM THAT BELONGS

GESTURES OF (RE)PAIR: TOWARDS A MUSEUM THAT BELONGS

In a majority of contexts, the frameworks through which museums have historically operated are deeply entangled with colonial conquest, imperial violence, and the epistemological dominance of the West. Whether ethnographic, natural history, or so-called “universal” art institutions, museums have not only collected but also extracted. They have not only protected but also erased. They have not only displayed but also distorted. Contemporary art museums are also not free from these entanglements. While acknowledging the visible, felt, and audible shifts within museums such as Melly Institute under the direction of Gabi Ngcobo, and the Haus der Kulturen de Welt under the direction of Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, this seminar aims to further unearth the inherent violence within historical museum practices while proposing new models that exist beyond the frameworks of museology in the Western context. Thinking alongside artistic practices such as Irena Haiduk’s “Nula”, Meschack Gaba’s “Museum of Contemporary African Art”, and multiple contemporary examples, students are invited to imagine and construct a museum that listens and belongs.

In creating our own (non)museum, we will also reference "non-institutional" practices that allow us to reimagine its potential as a living, breathing, morphing and expansive structure. Through a deep engagement with ritual, oral tradition, storytelling, music, dance, sonic memory, and speculative thinking, we will explore how knowledge systems rooted in indigenous and diasporic cosmologies from the Global Majority can offer alternative conceptions of how a museum can become a fluid space. A place of convergence that understands that sometimes objects sing and weep, that the archive sweats, and that architectures breathe. A site where knowledge is not fixed but felt, and where the death of the institution is not feared but welcomed as a fertile ground for rebirth. A museum that is brave enough to collapse, generous enough to transform, and rooted enough to be shaped by the worlds it seeks to belong to.

Guest curators, guest artists, a reading list, and excursion dates will be announced to participating students at the start of the Winter Semester 2025-26. To participate in the seminar, please submit a very brief paragraph of motivation (written, sonic, visual, or in any creative form) by email to donna.kukama@khm.de before 29.09.2025.