Abstract

Examining the histories of collections and retracing the provenance of their inventories is an essential part in the process of decolonizing museums. Exhibitions can act as important instruments for including a broader public in these activities and in creating a space where objects, archival material, and lived experience enter into a dialogue. Yet critical museum studies also confront the fact that exhibiting particularly sensitive collections risks reaffirming and reproducing the epistemological and structural violence that led to the formation of these collections in the first place. In this light, the talk focuses on an exhibition of death masks at the Jewish Museum Vienna in 1997 and, in particular, on a work by VALIE EXPORT, which the artist conceived in the context of this exhibition for the public space. While the museum display engaged the visitors visually, confronting them with the masks on the one hand, and their own gaze on the other hand, EXPORT’s sculpture allowed for an embodied and multisensory encounter with the masks. Taking into account Margit Berner’s claim that face masks are ‘hybrid objects,’ closely linked to human remains because of the physical contact between body and material, this presentation addresses the ways artistic re-engagements with sensitive collections might destabilize the historically conferred status of such artefacts and spark an element of resistance.

Bio

Maria Engelskirchen  is a Research Assistant at the Institute of Art History at the University of Münster (WWU). She studied Art History and French Philology in Cologne, Munich, Clermont-Ferrand, and Paris. From 2017 to 2020, she conducted doctoral research as part the project The Skulptur Projekte Archives: A Research Institution for Scholarship and the Public.