European Museums Research Articles

Visualizing Colonial Power

Abstract The aim of this paper is to compare the ways in which some of Europe’s most important colonial museums displayed their exhibits—how colonial territories and colonial subjects were represented through visual exhibition, how the display cases were arranged, which objects and artefacts were presented and in what sequence—as the clearest possible representation of the biological, technological, and cultural superiority of Europe with respect to the populations on display. The paper will therefore emphasise both the differences and different histories as well as the similarities between colonial museums in Europe. In fact, while acknowledging that there are special features linked to the differing conditions of both the motherland and her overseas territories, a common cultural horizon can be found in the different national museums taken into consideration here and in the interpretation of the inherent propaganda such institutions promoted.

User eXperience (UX) Evaluation for MR Cultural Applications: The CEMEC Holographic Showcases in European Museums

Within the EU CEMEC project framework, a novel approach for using holographic showcases in museums has been conceived and experimented upon in different venues in the context of an itinerant exhibition dealing with Early Medieval European collections. The purpose of this holographic showcase, the so-called “box of stories”, is to improve the link and interaction between real and virtual contents in the museum’s context, making the exhibited object “alive” in the visitors’ perception. An Avar sword and a Byzantine treasure have been used as the main case studies, and they have been experienced in the museums of several European regions by audiences with different cultural backgrounds. This has been a great opportunity to carry out user experience (UX) evaluations in order to collect feedback (from about 600 museum visitors) regarding the attractiveness of such a mixed reality (MR) system, its usability, the comprehension of the contents, the efficacy of the logistics and environmental conditions, as well as the educational impact. The results of such inquiries helped the CNR ISPC team to identify the most meaningful User eXperience Analytics (UXA) able to support the work of UX evaluators and UX designers to assess the efficacy of digital cultural products. Indeed, this manuscript presents UXA and tries to draft a concrete and effective evaluation model for future digital projects for museum contexts.

THE IMPORTANCE OF “COMMUNİTY CENTERS” AS A CULTURAL INSTITUTION IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF REPUBLIC PERIOD MUSEUM

The development of museology in Turkey corresponds to the last period of the Ottoman Empire (westernization period). One of the main reasons why the idea of museology developed in a late period in Turkey was that the protection of cultural heritage did not gain importance. In this direction, the importance of protecting ancient artifacts in a building and being a museum has been understood late. However, thanks to the museum examples that Ahmet Fethi Pasha, one of the important statesmen of the period, saw during his European travels, the lack of a museum in Turkey was constantly mentioned. European museums, which influenced the Pasha, strengthened the idea of establishing a museum in Istanbul day by day. Thus, museology activities were started with the transformation of Hagia Eirene Church into a museum. Hagia Iri Church was the first example in Turkey in terms of forming the core of the idea of museology. Ottoman period museology, after the foreign directors, Osman Hamdi Bey was appointed as the museum director, and Turkish Museology was brought to life in a real sense. Osman Hamdi has spent a lot of effort to advance museology in accordance with the contemporary understanding of museology. Considering in this context, it has been a preparatory stage in the museum of the Republic Period. When we look at the museums of the Republic Period, museum activities were carried out with a rapid breakthrough under the leadership of Atatürk. Community Centers, were established in order to adopt the reforms made in this period to the public. In time, a “museum branch” was added to the Community Centers. With the museology branch, it was aimed to explain the importance of museology to the public and to be sensitive about it. In the community centers, ethnographic materials reflecting the culture of the people were collected in the first place. Thus, preliminary preparations were made for the museums to be established. The main purpose of the study is to emphasize the importance of the Community Centers established in the Republican Period in Turkish Museology. Thanks to the community centers and cultural institutions established under the leadership of Atatürk, the adoption of museology to the public and its contributions to museology will be expressed. In the study, the historical background of the community centers will be included and the connection of these institutions with museology will be tried to be expressed.

The Sogdians and Their Religions in Turfan: Evidence in the Catalogue of the Middle Iranian Fragments in Sogdian Script of the Berlin Turfan Collection

We are able to verify the variety of the religions of the Sogdians by the text fragments found in the Turfan oasis (East Turkistan, today’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China). They are housed in several libraries and museums in Europe, Japan, and China. The Berlin Turfan collection contains a large part of them. The catalogue of the Sogdian text fragments in the indigenous Sogdian script of that collection was completed in 2018. The fragments represent parts of the literature of Christian, Manichaean and Buddhist communities in Turfan from the eighth to eleventh century CE. The best represented religion in the homeland of the Sogdians is a type of the Zoroastrian religion, as evidenced by archaeological findings and wall paintings. However, there are only very few texts found in Turfan and other locations in Central Asia which could be interpreted as Zoroastrian. The discussion about the religious affiliation of those texts is going on. The religious background of some other text fragments from Turfan is difficult to identify as well. Two of these examples will be published here. A remarkable feature of the religious communities in Turfan is the multilingual character of their literature, reflecting the development and path of the believers and the multi-ethnical structure of the community.

Jörg Echternkamp and Stephan Jaeger, eds. Views of Violence: Representing the Second World War in German and European Museums and Memorials. Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association, Vol. 19

Jörg Echternkamp and Stephan Jaeger, eds. <i>Views of Violence: Representing the Second World War in German and European Museums and Memorials</i>. Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association, Vol. 19

Exhibiting Refugee Routes: Contemporary Collecting as Memory Politics

In recent years, numerous European museums have collected objects related to refugees. This article examines the Flight for Life (På Flugt) exhibition (2017), which the National Museum of Denmark organized based on a contemporary collecting project that took place in Greece and Denmark in 2016. Alison Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory is made use of here to examine how the exhibition invited visitors to identify with refugees. This empathetic approach had political potential by promoting solidarity with refugees. However, it did not open up a broader contextualization of the collected objects in terms of the migration policies of Denmark and the European Union. This article argues that museums, through contemporary collecting projects of the refugee reception crisis, engage in memory politics by framing how Europe will be able to make sense of the refugee reception crisis of the early twenty-first century.

The Museum Age in Austria-Hungary. Art and empire in the long nineteenth century

For the first time, a study has appeared that covers the history of art museums in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth century, which includes not only Vienna but also Kraków, Prague, Zagreb and Budapest. In addition to studying their role as public institutions and their involvement in the complex cultural politics of the Habsburg Empire, the three authors of the present volume aim to explore the place of these institutions in the wider history of European museums and collecting. Within the ‘long nineteenth century’, they focus on the period from 1867, when Austria-Hungary formally came into existence as a constitutional monarchy, and 1918, when it collapsed as a consequence of the First World War. The lead author is Matthew Rampley, professor of art history at Masaryk University (Brno). He provides the introduction, entitled ‘Museums and cultural politics in the Habsburg world’, and the first chapter, ‘The museological landscape of Austria-Hungary’, both of which are nourished by, and also provide a framework for, the five following chapters. Two of the five are contributed by Nóra Veszprémi, research fellow at Masaryk University. Her contributions, ‘The rise of the museum professions’ and ‘Principles and practices of display’, are preceded by another from Rampley, ‘Museums and their architecture’, and one by Markian Prokopovych, assistant professor of history at Durham University, entitled ‘Art, municipal programs, and urban agendas’. Prokopovych also wrote the final chapter, ‘Museums and their publics’. An epilogue by Rampley, ‘Modernity and regime’s end’, offers a bridge to his and Veszprémi’s next (currently ongoing) project, entitled Continuity/Rupture: Art and Architecture in Central Europe, 1918–1939, also based at Masaryk University. The three authors previously published Liberalism, Nationalism and Design Reform in the Habsburg Empire: Museums of design, industry and the applied arts (Routledge, 2020).

Collective memory or the right to be forgotten? Cultures of digital memory and forgetting in the European Union

This article investigates cultures of digital memory and forgetting in the European Union. The article first gives some background to key debates in media memory studies, before going on to analyse the shaping of European Commission and European Union initiatives in relation to Google’s activities from the period 2004–present. The focus of inquiry for the discussion of memory is the Google Books project and Europeana, a database of digitized cultural collections drawn from European museums, libraries and archives. Attention is then given to questions of forgetting by exploring the tension between Google’s search and indexing mechanisms and the right to be forgotten. The article ends by reflecting on the scale of the shift in contemporary cultures of memory and forgetting, and considers how far European regulation enables possible interventions in this domain.

The Louvre going APESHIT: audiovisual re-curation and intellectual labour in The Carters’ Afrosurrealist music video

ABSTRACT This article offers a reading of the APESHIT music video by the duo The Carters (Beyoncé and Jay-Z) as an Afrosurrealist intervention in the White space of the Louvre. Against the backdrop of calls for decolonizing archives and public institutions such as the university and the museum, and arguing for the political potential of APESHIT, this article makes a case for the music video as an act of resistance against the enduring ‘coloniality of power' in the European museum and elsewhere in the public sphere. We argue that The Carters embrace the role of the public intellectual-activist - assumed to be within the remit of the Western, White, liberal intellectual for centuries. Our argument is threefold: (1) the aesthetics of the APESHIT music video builds on and contributes to the Afrosurrealist artistic tradition, engaging with contemporary Blackness via the strange and absurd; (2) the music video itself creates performance art that intervenes in and extends beyond the Louvre and audiovisually re-curates its exhibitions; (3) The Carters can be seen as celebrity ‘critical organic catalysts’ whose Afrosurrealist intervention targeted at the colonial legacies of museums activates a critical relationship with these museal spaces traditionally constructed as White spaces.

Zoological specimens from the Franco-Tuscan expedition to Egypt (1828–1829) in Museo di Storia Naturale dell’Università di Pisa

This paper describes the zoological specimens collected by Giuseppe Raddi during the Franco-Tuscan expedition to Egypt (1828–1829) held in the collection of the Museo di Storia Naturale dell’Università di Pisa. Twenty-two specimens exist, including four amphibians preserved in alcohol, and 18 taxidermy specimens (16 birds, 2 mammals). Among these is a specimen of the taxonomically controversial Canis lupaster (African wolf) and one of the first specimen of Oenanthe xanthoprymna (Kurdish wheatear) held in European museums.

CULTURE, EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE GLOBAL CONTEXT

The first part of this paper asks how European art education traditionally positions itself despite an ever-changing world, mainly in respect to the question how to teach cultural heritage. Focussing the history of art we can see that teaching the canon connected with development narratives is still dominant. But some trends can be observed that open the chance to further develop those traditions, e.g. focussing intercultural entanglements, transcultural understandings of ‘objects’ and including the issue of power. These trends try to provide answers to today's challenges. The inquiry finally leads to an analytical grid as a model to understand contemporary complexities in a better way.&#x0D; In the middle section, this is discussed in more detail using a concrete example, the political demands for the return of cultural heritage, the Benin bronzes that were stolen by British colonialists in Nigeria in the 19th century and are now mainly in European museums. It gets clear that the application of the model – developed in the first part – to this example reveals its limits, as unsolvable problems occur. The case study of the Benin bronzes triggers a set of new questions that are becoming increasingly important for art education – at least in Germany – but which have hardly been asked so far. Examples are: Who speaks? In which language? With whom? Who owns? Is negation a model for intercultural dialogue? Etcetera.&#x0D; In the last part, this set of questions is posed to a concrete international project with partners in Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya and South Africa that the author is co-ordinating at the Art of Fine Academy in Munich. The set of questions is used to critically explore this project in a way that could also be transferred to any other project in the field of art and cultural education in formal and non-formal settings.

Copying after masterworks of ancient art: The plaster cast collection of the Museum of the University of Wrocław and its ideological and academic context

Plaster cast collections of antique art, considered to be ideal form, constituted a significant part of public expositions in the European museums of the 19th c. The Museum of the University of Wroclaw was then holding one of the biggest such collections among university museums in Europe. This paper presents the collection of plaster cast copies of antique art objects held at the University of Wroclaw and contextualizes it within the tradition and purpose of academic art collections in Europe. To define the idea underpinning the creation and gradual expansion of Wroclaw-based collection, and to present it against its European background, the paper also refers to cast collections held at other academic institutions. Wroclaw-based collection is also contextualized within the philhellenic ideals setting the criteria for objects collected by the newly created museums and determining the ways in which these objects were exhibited.

Is Your Collection Ambiguous?

The natural history specimens of the world have been documented on paper labels, often physically attached to the specimen itself. As we transcribe these data to make them digital and more useful for analysis, we make interpretations. Sometimes these interpretations are trivial, because the label is unambiguous, but often the meaning is not so clear, even if it is easily read. One key element that suffers from considerable ambiguity is people’s names. Though a person is indivisible, their name can change, is rarely unique and can be written in many ways. Yet knowing the people associated with data is incredibly useful. Data on people can be used to validate other data, simplify data capture, link together data across domains, reduce duplication-of-effort and facilitate data-gap-analysis. In addition, people data enable the discovery of individuals unique to our collections, the collective charting of the history of scientific researchers and the provision of credit to the people who deserve it (Groom et al. 2020). We foresee a future where the people associated with collections are not ambiguous, are shared globally, and data of all kinds are linked through the people who generate them. The TDWG People in Biodiversity Data Task Group is therefore working on a guide to the disambiguation of people in natural history collections. The ultimate goal is to connect the various strings of characters on specimen labels and other documentation to persistent identifiers (PIDs) that unambiguously link a name “string” to the identity of a person. In working towards this goal, 150 volunteers in the Bionomia project have linked 21 million specimens to persistent identifiers for their collectors and determiners. An additional 2 million specimens with links to identifiers for people have already emerged directly from collections that make use of the recently ratified Darwin Core terms recordedByID and identifiedByID. Furthermore, the CETAF Botany Pilot conducted among a group of European herbaria and museums has connected over 1.4 million specimens to disambiguated collectors (Güntsch et al. 2021). Still, given the estimated 2 billion (Ariño 2010) natural history specimens globally, there is much more disambiguation to be done. The process of disambiguation starts with a trigger, which is often the transcription of a specimen’s label data. Unambiguous identification of the collector may facilitate this transcription, as it offers knowledge of their biographical details and collecting habits, allowing us to infer missing information such as collecting date or locality. Another trigger might be the flagging of inconsistent data during data entry or resulting from data quality processes, revealing for instance that multiple collectors have been conflated. A disambiguation trigger is followed by the gathering of data, then the evaluation of the results and finally by the documentation of the new information. Disambiguation is not always straightforward and there are many pitfalls. It requires access to biographical data, and identifiers to be minted. In the case of living people, they have to cooperate with being disambiguated and we have to follow legal and ethical guidelines. In the case of dead people, particularly those long dead, disambiguation may require considerable research. We will present the progress made by the People in Biodiversity Data Task Group and their recommendations for disambiguation in collections. We want to encourage other institutions to engage with a global effort of linking people to persistent identifiers to collaboratively improve all collection data.

TYPA, Innovation in a Museum Context

How do print museums develop an innovative approach to their collection while providing their visitors with historical context? Using artistic printmaking to keep the heritage of print alive, many ‘working museums’ promote the global knowledge of letterpress, relying on international collaborations to generate innovative and creative approaches. The the International Council of Museums’ guidelines, only refers to a ‘working museum’, but does not offer a clear definition of what this is. How can an operational print museum demonstrate innovative practices and retain the existing knowledge of letterpress? This paper will examine the ‘working print museum’, how it can be not only a site for reimagining the past but provide new forms of research and pioneering adaptations of old technologies. This research is inspired by the concept that as the initial infatuation with certain technologies has passed, we have entered a relationship with them in expanded artistic adventure. The paper promotes the idea that printmaking and letterpress allow for a collaborative approach which not only serves to strengthen communities but can be more than a mere reproduction of a historical process and allow for expanded experimentation. Through an in-depth look of the contemporary practices, ethos, and developments of printing museums in Europe, this paper raises questions surrounding the role of museums in this post-digital world. It will look at the future of the ‘working print museum’ and suggest how letterpress practices can extend through international and European collaborations.

The Cold War in European museums – filling the ‘empty battlefield’

ABSTRACT Recent historical research has analysed the Cold War as an ‘imaginary war’, an interpretation that poses specific challenges for displaying the conflict in museums. In contrast to well-established representations of the First and Second World Wars in exhibitions, we find that the nature of the Cold War in Europe and the North Atlantic has made it difficult to tell stories of victimhood, heroism and military valour. Moreover, the memory and heritage of the Cold War have often been presented as monolithic and lacking specific chronologies, adding to the difficulty of telling stories through objects. This article explores how selected museums and exhibitions in the UK and Germany have addressed this double challenge. We examine how the conflict is portrayed, how buildings, images, text and artefacts interact in selected museums and exhibitions, and how they generate specific interpretations. We show these interpretations to be diverse and fractured: each museum chose different paths to staging the Cold War. From their comparison, in the context of heritage studies, we make the case for a distinct museology of the Cold War. We argue for a reflective approach that encourages the engagement of museum and heritage professionals with diverse material culture, filling the ‘empty battlefield’.

Afropolitanist Return and Circulation

In June 2020, Congolese-born activist Mwazulu Diyabanza and five others attempted to remove a nineteenth-century Chadian funeral post from the Musée du Quai Branly—Jacques Chirac. Diyabanza would go on to enact this type of protest in two more European museums before the end of the year. He and his fellow protestors proclaimed a collective European and North American complicity and were tried by French courts for group theft of an object of cultural heritage. As the reader likely knows, the cultural heritage here in question was France's, whose appeal for the items in part mirrors Amanda M. Maples's Afropolitanist considerations in her First Word. These items have indeed been resocialized, but should at the very least be accessible to their communities of origin as they speak to different geographies in multiple languages (Maples 2020).The year 2020 and its deluge of surprises left us with small consolations: much of the African continent emerged from the COVID epidemic relatively unscathed. However, the virus' ramifications have already begun affecting sub-Saharan African countries, spurring legitimate concerns about vaccine equity. These dynamics undoubtedly mirror the stakes and discourse that affect sub-Saharan African countries and cultural institutions and only strengthen the case for financial support. Dr. Memel Kassi notes the disparity in the circulation of artwork among the United States, Europe, and the African continent in her contribution to this discussion, and I join her in a call for financial commitments from North American institutions. A model for comanagement, in the form of a fixed-term rental deposit, complements Maples's call for North American museums to properly investigate provenance and inform the placement of these works of art.However, this task cannot be completed unilaterally. Much of the cataloguing and provenance research, the investigations into cultural heritage and exercises that advance institutional capabilities in North American and European institutions, remains inaccessible to the majority of museum professionals on the African continent. Adopting a significant “role in a politics of cultural action” is an exercise that in and of itself demands boundless adaptability. Efforts such as the controversial Humboldt Museum's “Humboldt Lab Tanzania,” with support from TURN (The Fund for Artistic Cooperation between Germany and African Countries), engaged scholars in the sites of origin of selected pieces and the store rooms for the very sites where the artifacts are held. Such initiatives, though still insufficient, are essential to active cultural reengagement around these very artifacts.I also echo Christine Mullen Kreamer's reflection on the distinctions between process and outcome, and the manners in which both can be useful material exercises for developing new dynamics of equity between North American and African institutions. Given these histories of exclusion and the concerns around ensuring that artifact return follows and instills “sustainable development,” the hazards—legal, geopolitical, financial, emotional—demand novel modes of reasoning across institutions and geographies. Following Kreamer's question and reiterating Strother's own, we must ask how North American institutions can work toward outcomes that won't replicate the very imbalanced hierarchies of power that have produced the current complications around assessing the merits of return.North American institutional partnerships cannot be limited to North American peers. As Maples measuredly points out, the burden of devising best practice guidelines cannot be shouldered by one institution alone. The same logic extends continentally. Travel and knowledge-sharing must be made active and transparent and cannot exclude the very professionals who will themselves ensure conservation and curation for the objects that will be repatriated or circulated.We must not forget, ultimately, that properly accounting for the placement of African artwork is a mutually beneficial gesture in addition to an ethical obligation, one that will result in stronger relationships between African and North American museums. African institutions will hopefully only gain in prominence, agency, and influence in the future, bringing Amadou Mahtar M'Bow's 2000 appeal to fruition. Construction will soon begin for the Edo Museum of West African Art (EMOWAA) on the very site of the former Benin Palace. It is set to house the Benin Bronzes (on loan) after a fifty-year dream of restitution, embodying an Afropolitan repatriation of agency (Maples 2020). We are best served by cultivating a future where the most prominent bastions of African cultural heritage can be safely and conscientiously cherished from both sides of the Atlantic.

The Hummingbird Collection of the Natural History and Science Museum of the University of Porto (MHNC-UP), Portugal.

BackgroundThe Hummingbird (Family Trochilidae) Collection of the Natural History and Science Museum of the University of Porto (MHNC-UP) is one of the oldest collections of this family harboured in European museums. Almost 2,000 specimens, that encompass most of the taxonomic diversity of this family, were collected in the late 19th Century. The collection is relevant due its antiquity and because all specimens were bought from the same provider, mainly as mounted specimens, for a Portuguese private collection of Neotropical fauna. In the early 20th Century, it was donated to the Museum that is now the MHNC-UP.New informationThe information about the majority of these specimens is now available for consultation on the GBIF platform after curation of all specimens and digital cleaning of the associated metadata. In the process, hundreds of non-catalogued specimens were found and taxonomic and spatial information was updated for many of the specimens.

Pollution and permanence: museum repair in toxic worlds

ABSTRACT This article explores what repair might mean in the context of enduring toxic legacies of past museum practice. For centuries, museums have applied a wide range of pesticidal and preservative chemicals on objects to prevent insect infestation and material decay. This paper theorizes such chemicals as a significant museum technology which aided the perpetuation of museum objects, and both responded to and facilitated further growth of colonial collections in European museums. The case study examines both past practices of pesticide treatment in ethnographic museums and their effects on the repatriation of Sámi cultural artefacts today.

The features of using the interactive museum expositions in modern exhibition practice

The article analyzes the characteristic features of the interactive museum exposition as an integral part of the museum space. The main factors influencing the development and improvement of the modern museum exposition in general are substantiated. Based on the analysis of exposition solutions of European museums, the main models of multimedia technologies that can be used in the design of interactive museum expositions are proposed.

A glass Gem Depicting a Dying Niobid From the National Museum in Warsaw

The National Museum in Warsaw holds a diverse collection of glass gems, both ancient and modern. One of these, a specimen depicting a dying Niobid supported by his sister, belongs to a wider group of objects scattered throughout various European museums. Such gems were mainly produced during the 1st century BC and their decoration is derived from a fragment of a relief carved by Pheidias on the statue of Zeus in Olympia which portrays the massacre of the Niobids. The fact that these gems were made of glass indicates that objects with such decorations were appreciated and popular. The myth of Niobe, in both Greek and Roman art, served multiple purposes highlighted by the choice of the story’s motives most often used in decorations. However, the reason for the use of this particular fragment of Pheidias’s relief to decorate gems as well as their popularity require additional explanation.