Art, Colonialism, and an Anti-colonial Legacy: The Blind Spots in our Politics of Memory

»Freitag Salon, 2 at 8«

Jakob Augstein talked to Horst Bredekamp about anti-colonial and liberal concepts in the ethnological approach to cultures and the implications for an possible culture of remembrance on January 27th, at Volksbühne Berlin.

The discussion about how to deal with art from colonial contexts has been brewing for decades. Although a reappraisal of the colonial past is necessary in postcolonial discourse and debates about whether and how to carry out restitution — the return of art objects to former colonial territories — the art historian Horst Bredekamp feels that there is also a need for a precise examination of some of the decidedly anti-colonial and liberal ideas in the ethnological approach to cultures that were practiced in the nineteenth century by scholars such as Aby Warburg or Franz Boas. For Bredekamp it is not only about enriching our cultural memory, but also the contribution that this universal approach can make to collecting today and handling existing collections — a debate that also surrounds one of the largest museum projects of recent years, the Humboldt Forum in Berlin.

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