Bitte beachten Sie die geänderten Öffnungszeiten ab 16. April 2024. Mehr

Was fehlt? Europa sammeln und ausstellen

Konferenz in englischer Sprache von 26. bis 28. Juni 2019
Museum Europäischer Kulturen – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Anlässlich seines  20-jährigen Jubiläums richtet MEK – Museum Europäischer Kulturen – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin die Konferenz „Was fehlt? Europa sammeln und ausstellen“ aus. Sie lenkt den Blick auf Leerstellen: Welche bisher nicht oder zu wenig beachteten Objekte, Narrative, Methoden und Akteur*innen fehlen, um zeitgenössische Lebensrealitäten und Gesellschaften in Europa zu reflektieren?

Zahlreiche alltagskulturelle Sammlungen und Museen in ganz Europa durchlaufen schon seit einiger Zeit Transformationsprozesse – von historischen, volkskundlichen, national und z. T. ethnisch ausgerichteten Einrichtungen zu zeitgenössisch, europäisch und transkulturell orientierten Institutionen. Die historischen Sammlungen sind dabei gleichzeitig Fluch und Segen. Sie sind Grundlage unserer Existenz, bilden aber kaum heutige soziale Entwicklungen ab. Wie können wir diesen Themen – vor dem Hintergrund aktueller theoretischer Debatten, die Dinge, Akteur*innen, Räume und Wege stärker zusammendenken – im Museum adäquat Rechnung tragen?

Zudem wird das politische europäische Projekt zunehmend infrage gestellt. Welche gesellschaftliche Rolle wollen und können Museen – insbesondere ehemals volkskundlich orientierte Museen – in diesen Debatten eines Europas im Umbruch spielen? Wie können Re-Interpretationen von Sammlungen und Gegenwartsorientierungen von Ausstellungen aus queeren, dis/ability-, dekolonialen, (post)migrantischen oder ‚flüchtigen‘ Perspektiven in die Museumsarbeit integriert werden?

„Was fehlt?“ möchte eine Plattform für Museumspraktiker*innen und Theoretiker*innen zum Austausch über das Identifizieren, Herausfordern und Integrieren von „Leerstellen“ in solchen Museum bieten, die eine reflexive und kritische „Europäisierung“ ihrer Arbeit anstreben.

Deadline der Registrierung: 20. Juni 2019 via mek[at]smb.spk-berlin.de

Konferenzgebühr: 20 € /10 € erm. für Studierende, Auszubildenden und Arbeitssuchende (bei der Anmeldung zu zahlen)

Ort: Museen Dahlem, Lansstraße 8, 14195 Berlin, die Abendveranstaltungen finden im MEK, Eingang Arnimallee 25, statt.

Konferenzsprache: Englisch

Die Konferenz wird gefördert durch die Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, den Verein der Freunde des Museums Europäischer Kulturen e.V., museum & location und den Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz. 

Programm

Mittwoch, 26. Juni 2019

18 Uhr: Abendvortrag

The relations and interactions between the central and peripheral, the core and its margins, have always been an issue for museums and can be observed through the various ways they define themselves, realise the role they assume, design their activities, through the way they connect with their publics and the themes they cover. Those at margins tend to remain unseen, unheard, unspoken of and neglected, if we do not actively remind ourselves of these main questions "what is missing?", "what is excluded?" In her lecture, Suay Aksoy will focus on the paradigm shift that ICOM is going through and the responsibility it assumes, as the global organisation of museums, in strengthening the role that museums can play to create an inclusive society (e.g. its on-going debate on museum definition) and to ensure the well-being of its communities, which could only be possible through adopting new and creative approaches to deal with exclusion and inequality.

Suay Aksoy is president of ICOM. Previously, she served as Chair of ICOM Advisory Council and Chair of CAMOC. She taught graduate and undergraduate courses in Museum Management and Cultural Heritage and headed museum projects at the History Foundation of Turkey, where she later served as board member and vice-president. As director of Cultural Heritage and Museums at the Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Agency, she developed and led major projects on the rehabilitation of museums in Turkey. Aksoy holds a BA in Economics, an MA in Political Science and a PGDip in Museum Studies.


Donnerstag, 27. Juni 2019

10 Uhr: Tagungseröffnung

Christina Haak has been deputy director general of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz since 2011. Additionally, in 2017, she became chief digital officer and therefore responsible for digital transformation of the foundation. From 2009 to 2011, she was head of project planning at the General Directorate of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, before which she led the project management at Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel (formerly Staatliche Museen Kassel) and did academic work at Museum für Kommunikation, Frankfurt am Main. In May 2018, she was appointed vice-president of the Deutscher Museumsbund e.V. (German Museum Association).

Elisabeth Tietmeyer, PhD, director of the Museum Europäischer Kulturen – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, studied Social and Cultural Anthropology, and Sociology. She was head of the European Department and of the Collection Department at the Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin, after which she acted as senior curator and vice-director of the Museum Europäischer Kulturen. Her research focuses on topics such as diversity, culture contacts, self/other, gender, and im/material culture. She is a board member of ICOM Germany and a member of the expert committee of the German UNESCO commission on Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Iris Edenheiser, PhD, cultural anthropologist, is deputy director of the Museum Europäischer Kulturen – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Previously, she worked with global ethnographic collections in Leipzig, Dresden and Mannheim. She is especially interested in the (post-)colonial entanglements of museum collections and their curation, and the positioning of museums in debates around diversity and social and economic inequalities. She is co-editor of a recent book on provenance research in colonial ethnographic collections (together with Larissa Förster, Sarah Fründt und Heike Hartmann) and is also currently editing an introduction to German museum anthropology (together with Larissa Förster).   


10:30 Uhr: Panel I: Globales Europa

Judith Schühle, PhD, social and cultural anthropologist, is curator at the Museum Europäischer Kulturen – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Previously, she worked as a researcher at Freie Universität Berlin. She is especially interested in merging tangible and intangible cultural heritage in museum collections as well as the question of a possible empowering role that museums can play in contemporary societies. She has co-curated numerous exhibitions with participative approaches and co-authored museum publications.   

Representations of the European “other” occupy positions of visual authority in some of the most important museums in the world. Conversely, Indigenous representations of Europeans as the “other” remain buried – physically and semantically – in numerous European museum collections. Rarely detected by curators, let alone by the public, such works were created during the colonial era for trade and personal use. They reveal views of the European as the “other” in foreign and exotic ways. Examining these works leads us to further consider how the practice of representing otherness continues today. This paper explores how the works found in European collections can be exhibited and curated today, but through Indigenous eyes.

Gerald McMaster, curator, artist, author, and professor of Indigenous Visual Culture and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University, Toronto. He has worked at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. In 1995 he was Canadian commissioner to the Venice Biennale; in 2012 he was an artistic director of the 18th Biennale of Sydney; and in 2018 he was curator for the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Looking at the Rum, Sweat and Tears exhibition, Imani Tafari-Ama will address the ontological binaries entrenched in the rum cask and its fiery liquid contents and the sugar bowl with its white gold, which are objects in everyday use in Flensburg, branded as Germany’s Rum City.  The annual Rum Regatta declares the disconnection of Flensburgers from the rootedness of these objects in the enslavement of Africans in the Killing Fields of the Caribbean. This exploitation of the Global South by the Global North has endured for six centuries, resulting in the underdevelopment of the primary producers of the objects in focus, while European nations have advanced. Eurocentric contrived colonial amnesia, undergirded by the lie of white supremacy and black inferiority, deployed to justify this contradiction, is currently being challenged by a Reparations agenda.

Imani Tafari-Ama is currently research fellow at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies – Regional Coordinating Office (IGDS-RCO) at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, after a year as Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence in the Anthropology Department at Bridgewater State University. Tafari-Ama won an International Fellow and Curator award in 2016-17, participated in the mobile Fellow Me Academy and served as guest curator of the exhibition Rum, Sweat and Tears at the Flensburg Maritime Museum, Germany. Following her PhD in Development Studies and MA in Women and Development Studies, Tafari-Ama has lectured internationally across a broad range of disciplines.

This presentation discusses the Europe Exhibit in the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka. This exhibit opened in 2012 as one of the twelve regional exhibitions, and is located between the Exhibit of Native America and Africa. In this museum, Europe and non-western cultures, as well as Japan are juxtaposed. Regional and cross-cultural exhibitions such as ‘Music and Language’ constitute the permanent exhibition. The matter here is how we catch “Europe” as an object of a permanent regional exhibition in an ethnological research museum. Akiko Mori will describe the process of planning and creating the present exhibit, and point towards a provisional plan of a partial renovation for the next year. Throughout this discussion, questions related to regional cultures and the nature of cultural encounters emerge anew to be explored.

Akiko Mori currently holds a position as Professor at the Department of Globalization and Humanity at the National Museum of Ethnology and at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Osaka. She obtained a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Tsukuba in 1997. Field research of ethnographic studies was carried out in Lower Carinthia (1986–1995) and in Berlin (2000–2018). Edited publications include Exhibiting Cultures: Comparative Perspectives from Japan and Europe (2014), and The Anthropology of Europe as Seen from Japan: Considering Contemporary Forms and Meanings of the Social (2013).

How far would you travel to find a better life and what would you bring with you to create that new life? Millions of migrants considered these questions as they migrated from different regions in Europe to the United States in the early 20th century. The answers can be found in museum collections throughout the US today, such as the museum collections in the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration (New York) and the Nordic Museum (Seattle). Both museums include exhibits that contain objects representative of home life, working tools, musical instruments, religious objects, family photographs and clothing. They provide a glimpse of how individual immigrants viewed themselves and their cultural identity when they entered the new country, though this cultural identity changed as the immigrants adapted to a new culture and way of life in the United States.

Diana Pardue is director of museum programmes at the Statue of Liberty National Monument and Ellis Island and has been involved internationally with the development of new migration museums. She is a member of ICOM’s Executive Board and its Disaster Risk Management Standing Committee and Working Group on Sustainability. She has been a member and co-chair of ICOM-US and chair of the International Committee of Architecture and Museum Techniques (ICAMT), ICOM. She is also an active member of the American Association of Museums (AAM), Organization of American Historians (OAH) and the National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites (NCWS).


13 Uhr: Panel II: Towards the Transformation of Collections of Everyday Culture

Magda Buchczyk is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, investigating what the collections of the  Museum Europäischer Kulturen can tell us about the museum’s past and future. Trained in anthropology and cultural heritage, she studies knowledge practices through ethnographies of material culture, museum collections and cities. Her PhD, completed at Goldsmith’s University London in 2015,  explored history, heritage and crafts through Romanian collections of textiles and pottery. She also worked at the University of Bristol and University College London, conducting ethnographic research of the learning infrastructure of the city and coordinating the UK research infrastructure of heritage science.

Volkskundemuseum Wien is often confronted with questions about its collection strategy from both inside and out. Its collections and the museum’s extensive concept of research in European ethnology often do not match. Additionally, cultural policy and society with their complex demands on the museum drive us more than we drive ourselves. Being driven entirely by success in the economic context, we are ourselves working on the increasing meaninglessness of the collection's work. Despite the scarcity of our time, we think about the future of our collections in countless meetings. In the meantime, we forget to look at ourselves, to be open, to be on the road, to interact, and to think radically. This raises questions about the organisational structure and whether it mobilises us. In his presentation, Matthias Beitl asks: Do we make ourselves understood to the outside world? And who actually owns the museums? #nutzedeinmuseum #useum

Matthias Beitl completed his studies in European Ethnology at the University of Vienna and an export course at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. From 1996, he worked at the Ethnographic Museum Schloss Kittsee, and at the Austrian Museum of Ethnology from 2003, where he became deputy director (2006) and then director (2014). From 2007 to 2013, he was member of the Board of ICME (International Committee for Museums of Ethnography) and since 2014 he is vice president of the Austrian Museum Association. He is also involved in cultural projects within fourcon GmbH.

The Ethnographic Museum in Kraków possesses the oldest ethnographic collection in Poland. During its creation, and until the end of the 20th century, its distinctive feature was the concept of "traditional folk culture". Social changes and the change of scientific paradigm have set new challenges for museologists in collection management. The key question is: what should an ethnographic museum be, given the excess of things and ideas in the modern world? The exhibition project on schools at the Ethnograpic Museum in Kraków initiated the contextual building of the museum’s collection. This approach was carried on throughout new research into different cultural areas. Małgorzata Oleszkiewicz presents an example of the kind of problems they faced in the process and which decisions were made in the realisation of the research project "Weddings 21".

Małgorzata Oleszkiewicz, is a senior curator at the Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum in Kraków. She has authored many publications and curated numerous exhibitions. Oleszkiewicz is a chairwoman of the Museum Section of the Polish Ethnological Society, president of the branch of the Polish Ethnological Society in Krakow, and member of ICOM, the Association of Polish Museum Professionals, the Society of Friends of History and Monuments of Kraków.

The new museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (MuCEM) opened in Marseilles in 2013. This museum follows the metamorphosis of the famous ethnographical French museum created by Georges Henri Rivière in the 1930s. The largest part of its rich collections – with over 1 million objects and immaterial heritage – was collected following field surveys. In this presentation, Denis Chevallier will present a selection of recent fieldwork on rather contemporary and for ethnographic museums certainly novel topics, carried out by the museum. The studies developed insight on topics as gender, economy of waste, football or AIDS, which contributed to the enrichment of the museum’s collections. This approach as well as the experiences of the MuCEM following this approach will be discussed by Chevallier.

Denis Chevallier holds a PhD in Ethnology and launched several research programmes on traditional ecological knowledge, the transmission of know-how and the economic impact of revivals in his role as project leader at the French Ministry of Culture’s Ethnological Heritage Service from 1982. In 2000, he joined the MNATP (Musée national des Arts et Traditions Populaires) as a senior curator and became involved in the transformation of what is now the MuCEM. Here, he led the research programme on construction of gender in Europe and the Mediterranean (2002-2009), became deputy director of Science & head of the Research and Teaching Department (2013), curated At the Bazaar of Gender (2013) and led the research programme for the exhibition Junk, an economy of waste (2014).

In the current project “Máttáráhkku ládjogahpir - Foremothers horn hat”, Harlin works together with Sámi artist Outi Pieski. The hat was used by Sámi women in certain areas from 1750 to 1920, and many of the hats are now located in Nordic and European museums. However, traditional knowledge about the hat was no longer shared in the Sámi society. The project studied the history of the hat, drew up formulas, shared information with the Sámi society and arranged workshops, where Sámi women produced a ládjogahpir using modern methods. Interviews with the participants in the workshops provided insight in the meanings and feelings the hat embodies today. In this presentation, Eeva-Kristiina Harlin draws on the project and its results to describe repatriation and its influences on a collective and individual level, emphasising the importance of repatriation of ethnographic collections for Indigenous communities.

Eeva-Kristiina Harlin is a PhD researcher in Giellagas Institute, University of Oulu. Her PhD research deals with repatriation politics of Sámi tangible heritage. She has worked at the Finnish Heritage Agency, the Historical museum in Sweden, the Sámi museum Siida in Finland, RiddoDuottarMuseat in Norway and Sámi Archives in Finland. Harlin has conducted surveys regarding Sámi tangible heritage in Nordic and European museums and she is currently doing a survey on Sámi archival material in European institutes. Máttáráhku ládjogahpir – Foremother’s horn hat is part of her PhD research.


15 Uhr: Gespräch

Susan Kamel will talk with renowned journalist and author of Stop asking! I am from here Ferda Ataman about childhood, museums and the power of belonging.

Ferda Ataman is a Berlin-based journalist and activist. She writes a column on Spiegel Online about German migration issues. Formerly she was the head of Public Relations at the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency. She is also board member of the association “Neue Deutsche Medienmacher” (new German media makers). Since 2017, she is the spokesperson of an umbrella association called “new German organizations”, which aims to make Germans of Colour more visible. In March 2019, she published a book named ‘Stop asking. I am from here’, which started a debate about belonging in German society.

Susan Kamel is Professor for Museum Studies at the University of Applied Sciences Berlin (HTW Berlin). She conducted research about curating Islamic Art and Cultural Histories in the Arab World and Europe (2006-2014) and curated numerous exhibitions in which she included communities in the process of exhibition development. These projects have shown that an ‘in-reach’ (a reorganisation of organisational structures), must be considered the first necessary step to increase accessibility of the institution as a whole. Today, she continues to work on collaborative exhibition development projects to empower communities, most of which are her own.


16 Uhr: Touren


16 Uhr: Archive of Forgotten Memories

Archive of Forgotten Memories invites visitors to think about what they want to forget and how they can do that. Everyone is invited to create a text or drawing of a 'memory' they want to forget. Through a thorough process of destruction, the memory will be forgotten; it is now ready to become part of the Archive of Forgotten Memories. The participants will also be asked: why should we forget certain things? Through this process, the team of POEM fellows introduce themes such as: remembering vs. forgetting, place of symbolism and ceremonies in culture, individual vs. collective memory, co-creation, memory institutions, and memory modalities.

POEM is a research project on Participatory Memory Practices, which explores concepts, strategies and media infrastructures for envisioning socially inclusive potential futures of European Societies through culture. Inge Zwart, Franziska Mucha and Cassy Kist present some of the project’s central questions through this ‘One-Stop-Shop’. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 764859.


Freitag, 28. Juni 2019

10 Uhr: Panel III: Methoden & Strukturen

Moderation: Iris Edenheiser (Museum Europäischer Kulturen – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)

This presentation explores how museums and heritage sites have approached the interrogation and reframing of existing collections with the explicit ambition to address contemporary social and political inequalities. Drawing on recent collaborative projects carried out by the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries that have set out to engender public support for disability and LGBTQ equality, Richard Sandell examines both the strategies that have been deployed to address the silencing and erasure of disabled and queer lives in museums and the ways in which audiences engage with the resulting new narratives.  His work reveals the ways in which museum work can be understood as a form of human rights work with consequences that spread far beyond the gallery walls.

Richard Sandell is Professor in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester and co-director of the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG). His research and practice, carried out in collaboration with museums, galleries and heritage organisations, explores the potential that museums might play in supporting human rights, social justice and equality. Sandell led the research partnership between the National Trust and RCMG that shaped the award-winning Prejudice and Pride programme, 2017-18. He is currently working with the Wellcome Collection on the development of their new permanent gallery, opening September 2019. His most recent publications include - Museums, Moralities and Human Rights (2017) and Museum Activism (2019).

Awkward Objects of Genocide is a research and curatorial project investigating artworks representing the Holocaust, made by "vernacular" Polish artists, mostly in the 1960s and 70s. It raises questions about what kind of memory these works represent, whose memory, and whether the objects can be treated as sources of Holocaust commemoration or "witness art." The project was initiated as part of the EU Horizon 2020 grant, TRACES: Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts, From Intervention to Co-Production, a three-year research project investigating the role of contentious heritage in contemporary Europe, deploying a combined artistic/ethnographic research methodology. This talk will present the preliminary findings and reflections on working with a multidisciplinary team.

Erica Lehrer is a sociocultural anthropologist and curator. She is currently Professor in the departments of History and Sociology-Anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal, where she founded and directs the Curating and Public Scholarship Lab (CaPSL). Publications include Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (2013); and Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions (with Shelley Butler, 2016). She curated Souvenir, Talisman, Toy (2013) and Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust (2018-19) at the Kraków Ethnographic Museum.

In Greece, the abundance of archaeological remains from all periods of antiquity, has shaped an array of stereotypes about the identity of the country and its fixation on its venerated past. The country’s history has defined the predominance of archaeological museums and the limited representation of other types of museums and collections. But where do Greek museums stand today in the production of local, national and international narratives about both past and present? This presentation will outline the historical and institutional (legal and other) factors that determined the shaping of museums in Greece and their current operation in times of austerity and acute crisis. Marlen Mouliou will reflect on museum projects, cultural events and museum-like initiatives that have been developed to move beyond renowned national narratives and embrace more diverse histories.

Marlen Mouliou is a lecturer of Museology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens-NKUA, Faculty of History and Archaeology & Postgraduate Programme in Museum Studies, who believes in the social value and transformative power of museums. She worked as an archaeologist-museologist at the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, and from 2010 to 2016, she was secretary and chair of the International Committee for the Collections and Activities of Museums of Cities (ICOM-CAMOC). In 2016, she became a judge for the European Museum of the Year Award and vice-chair of UNIVERSEUM (European Academic Heritage Network).


12 Uhr: Panel IV: Exhibiting Europe?

Brigitte Heck holds an MA in Folklore, History and Modern German Literature at the University of Freiburg and the University of Vienna. As leading conservator at the Badisches Landesmuseum in Karlsruhe and head of the Department of Folklore (including the regional office for Folklore research in Staufen and the German Musikautomaten-Museum in Bruchsal), she focuses on collection research, participation and musealisation. She has contributed to field-specific, economic- and socio-historical, musicological exhibitions and publications, and she teaches at the Universities of Freiburg, Würzburg and Mainz.

The formation of ethnographic museums in the 19th century was accompanied by a world-view with Europe as centre stage. The main actors considered themselves as proponents of Enlightenment, acknowledging neither their Eurocentric attitude nor its consequences. This mind-set resulted in a logic of hierarchic classification and dichotomous concepts – not only – in ethnographic museums. This strongly implies that “Europe” cannot be a blank spot in the museum itself, whilst the museums continue to be confronted with the consequences of these concepts. To overcome the inherent problems is a major challenge. Museum der Kulturen Basel (MKB) tackles these issues by including European objects from its collections into its programme: each exhibition has to be connected to the hic & nunc, to the here and now. Referring to two recent exhibitions, Anna Schmid will show how this is achieved.

Anna Schmid has been director of the Museum der Kulturen Basel (MKB) since 2006. Under her leadership the MKB was enlarged, renovated, and transformed into a museum of contemporary ethnography/anthropology with a new vision, and a new collecting and exhibition policy. She formerly held various positions at different institutions as curator and lecturer. She carried out research on the relationship between craftspeople and the wider society in Pakistan for her PhD, and did extensive fieldwork in South Asia from 1988 until 2002.

The House of European History in Brussels presents the first permanent exhibition narrating history from a European perspective. Re-contextualised in a transnational narrative, the objects, documents, images and films presented in its exhibitions take on a new, European meaning. While the museum has proven a marked success with its visitors, individual critics have pointed out topics that, in their view, are ‘missing’. The list ranges from colonial history post-World War II, the history of religions, or a more in-depth explanation of European integration history. Some of the comments are expressions of contested histories and competing memories. But what have been the challenges of forming an inclusive and multi-perspective narrative in the limited confines of the museum space?

Kieran Burns is a senior curator at the House of European History, responsible for the museum’s sections on European Heritage and Memory, Colonialism and Science in the 19th Century, and World War I. He is also lead curator of the exhibition “Restless Youth: Growing Up in Europe 1945 to Now.” With over 20 years of curatorial experience, Kieran is a former director for Education at the Irish Museums Association. He has written on the need represent a diversity of histories within the traditional museum environment and is a passionate advocate of the museum as a public service institution.

If we wish to understand the present Hungarian politics of memory-politics at national, local or institutional levels, we can say that they can be adequately interpreted along some longue durée structures. In her work, Kárla Kuti takes a closer look at these structures based on the indicator-phenomena of collective memory (victimhood as a historical tradition), the functioning of local communities (decline of the educated middle class) and the relationship between city and country (Budapest vs. countryside). She will discuss these structures using the example of the permanent exhibition ‘We and the Others’ in the Hungarian German Minority Museum, which was curated by Kuti herself.

Klára Kuti holds a PhD in European Ethnology and an MA in European Ethnology and German Studies. She was a scientific assistant at the Institute of Ethnology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and a university professor at the Department of Ethnography and Cultural Anthropology. From 2014 onwards, she has been a museum associate at the Hungarian German Minority Museum, after which she started her current position at the Hungarian National Museum in 2017.

People in Europe are often not aware of how their general perception is intensively influenced by nation states, their history (especially in the 19th and 20th century), and the public discourse that exists only within the national borders. This presentation shows how the Three-Countries-Museum tries to reflect on this by connecting with the neighbouring countries France, Germany and Switzerland through cross-border exhibitions and projects. Exhibition pieces of everyday life and popular culture especially, can illustrate both the transnational similarity of culture, as well as the separating effect of modern borders on the identity of people. Markus Moehring will draw from different examples to reflect on this theme, and discuss a series of multiple exhibitions on one topic in the three countries and the reaction of the public.

Markus Moehring was appointed director of the Three-Countries-Museum in Lörrach in 1991. This museum, on the border triangle of France, Germany and Switzerland, is the only one of its type in Europe. With its transnational collections, exhibitions and activities, the museum reflects on the extent to which people are formed by nation states. The different perspectives on specific topics are addressed in cross-border exhibition series with partner museums in the three countries.


14:30 Uhr: Reflections & Final Discussion

Sharon Macdonald is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Social Anthropology in the Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she also directs CARMAH – the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage. Her recent publications include Memorylands. Heritage and Identity in Europe Today, and, as co-editor, Refugees Welcome? Difference and Diversity in a Changing Germany, and Engaging Anthropological Legacies (a special section of Museum Worlds).