SYMPOSIUM: RACE, POWER & CULTURE A Critical Look At Belgian Cultural Institutions

23 May 2019

Performative Reading#Asylstadmuseum# Oral presentations
As I read through the lines of the symposium "Race, Power and Culture: A Critical Look at Belgian Cultural Institutions", I immediately remembered the Asylstadmuseum project that was held in Munich at the Statdmuseum between 2013 and 2014. The aim was to offer the public the release of 60 objects of African art that had been stored for 50 years in the Puppet Museum in Munich.
It may be uncomfortable and politically incorrect to align the issue of migration and the status of African objects in ethnographic museums with issues related to restitution, racism and discrimination.
However, it seems to me that all these questions are linked if we consider that the subject and the object are at the heart of the liberal and capitalist field in which we live.
Based on this artistic experience, the proposed reading is a narrative polyphony between fiction and reality on the social body and the institution.