Duration: 00:39:11; Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1; Hue: 191.222; Saturation: 0.011; Lightness: 0.163; Volume: 0.201; Cuts per Minute: 0.638
Summary: Beatrice von Bismarck (Leipzig, Berlin) is professor of art history and visual culture at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. From 1989 - 1993 she worked as a curator of the department of 20th Century art Städelschen Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt/Main and until 1999 she taught at Lüneburg University. There she was co-founder and -director of the project-space Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg. In Leipzig she also co-founded the project-space Ñ/D/O/C/K-Projektbereich and initiated the M.A. Program 'Cultures of the Curatorial', which started in autumn 2009. Her current research areas include: Modes of cultural production connecting theory and practice; curatorial practice; effects of neo-liberalism and globalization on the cultural field; postmodern concepts of the artist. Her publications include, among numerous others, the seminal book Interarchive. Archival Practices and Sites in the Contemporary Art Field, Cologne 2002 (edited with Hans-Peter Feldmann, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Diethelm Stoller, Ulf Wuggenig).
The Archive in Transformation: The Royal Museum for Central Africa (Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale) in Tervuren, Belgium, is an ethnographic and anthropolical institution which exemplifies the developmental stages involved in the processing of colonial history from the end of the nineteenth century into the present. Founded in 1907 it makes apparent a view of the African continent characterized by the perspective of European expansionist politics. In the year 2008 the German artist Peggy Buth has taken this cultural archive as the starting point of her on-going documentation and research project “Desire in Representation”. It combines documentary photo material of the museum´s representation of Central Africa and its colonization with a narrative created by quotations of travelogues and adventure stories, archival images and historic documents from the colonial days of Belgium and Germany, and integrates them in the production of a series of installations, a film, two book publications and an exhibition. The talk will trace the archival strategies Buth employed in order to create counter-narratives to that of the institutional tradition and to expose the colonizers´ desires and expectations.
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