Book Review: Das Humboldt Lab. Museumsexperimente zwischen postkolonialer Revision und szenografischer Wende. By Johanna Di Blasi. Bielefeld: transcript (Edition Museum. Band 41), 2019
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2020-10
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Johns Hopkins University Press
Abstract
This volume focuses on the Humboldt Lab Dahlem (2012–2015) as an experimental platform for exploring the futures of ethnographic collecting, curating, exhibiting, and collaborative research. Johanna Di Blasi examines the role of the Humboldt Lab in developing conceptual models and practices for the integration of the collections of the Ethnologisches Museum and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst in Berlin-Dahlem (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) into the institutional structure of the Humboldt Forum prior to its projected opening in 2020 (65–66). As a Probebühne for the Humboldt Forum, the Humboldt Lab developed a collaborative, transdisciplinary space, which subsequently resulted in thirty projects and engaged 300 anthropologists, curators, and artists in testing alternative curatorial practices and new exhibition designs (73). Di Blasi’s study, based on her dissertation, not only references the ongoing debates regarding the development of the Humboldt Forum but also intersects with broader discourses in cultural anthropology, art history, and museum studies regarding the contested historical legacies and contemporary roles of ethnological museums and related issues of decolonization, repatriation of collections, participatory museums, institutional critique, and socially engaged art. Although neither the Humboldt Lab nor the Forum were designated as “museums,” [End Page 651] the Lab was an attempt to navigate a path forward from the museums in Dahlem and their ethnographic collections to the new institutional context of the Humboldt Forum, located behind the façade of the Berliner Schloss.
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Comments
This book review is published as Rectanus, M.W., Book Review: Das Humboldt Lab. Museumsexperimente zwischen postkolonialer Revision und szenografischer Wende. By Johanna Di Blasi. Bielefeld: transcript, 2019. Pp. 292. Paper €34.99. ISBN 978-3837649208. German Studies Review, October 2020, 43(3);651-653. https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/552. Posted with permission.