Decentring the Museum: Contemporary Art Institutions and Colonial Legacies

Nina Mö ntmann’s timely book extends the decolonisation debate to the institutions of contemporary art. In a thoughtfully articulated text, illustrated with pertinent examples of best practice, she argues that museums and galleries of contemporary art have a responsibility to ’decenter’ their institutions, removing from their collections, exhibition policies and infrastructures a deeply embedded Euro-centric cultural focus with roots in the history of colonialism. In this, she argues, they can learn from the example both of anthropological museums (such as the Humboldt Forum in Berlin and the British Museum), which are engaged in debates about the colonial histories of their collections, and of small-scale art spaces (such as La Colonie in Paris or Savvy Contemporary in Berlin), which have the flexibility to initiate different kinds of conversation - for example, by programming exhibitions and events in collaboration with local diasporic communities from the global south.

Nina Mö ntmann is Professor of Art Theory at the University of Cologne, and curator, writer and PI at the Global South Study Center (GSSC) at the University of Cologne. Her previous publications include Kunst als Sozialer Raum and the edited volumes Brave New Work: A Reader on Harun Farocki’s film ’A New Product’, Scandalous: A Reader on Art & Ethics, New Communities and Art and Its Institutions. Paul Goodwin is a curator, researcher and educator whose research focuses on Black British Art and African diaspora art since 1980 and transnationalism in contemporary art production. He is Professor of Contemporary Art & Urbanism and Director of the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) at University of the Arts London.