Curating Transcultural Spaces: Perspectives on Postcolonial Conflicts in Museum Culture

Curating Transcultural Spacesasks what a museum which enables the presentation of multiple perspectives might look like. Can identity be global and local at the same time? How may one curate dual identity? More broadly, what is the link between the arts and processes of identity construction?

This volume, an indispensable source for the process of engaging with colonial history in Germany and beyond, takes its starting point from the ’scandal’ of the Humboldt Forum. The transfer of German state collections from the Ethnological Museum and the Museum for Asian Art, located at the margins of Berlin in Dahlem, into the centre of Germany’s capital indicates the nation’s aspiration of purported multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism; yet the project’s resurrection of the site’s former Prussian city palace, which was demolished during the GDR, stands in opposition to its very mission, given that the Prussian rulers benefited from colonial exploitation. By examining the contrasting successes of other projects, such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, Curating Transcultural Spaces compellingly argues for the necessity of taking post-colonial thinking on board in the construction of museum spaces in order to generate genuine exchange between multiple perspectives.

Sarah Hegenbart is a Lecturer in Art History at Technical University Munich, Germany. Prior to this, she worked as an Associate Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute, where she also undertook her doctoral research, and as Curator of Art at Pembroke College, UK. She has also worked in the cultural section at the German Embassy in London, after completing an M.St. in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Magister in Philosophy and History of Art at the Humboldt University of Berlin.