1st HZK-CARMAH Colloquium in winter semester 22/23

14 November 2022, 2 p.m. right on time.

The event will take place at the HZK (House 3, Gerlachbau next to the Tieranatomischen Theater TAT, Campus Nord, Philippstraße 13) and virtually (Access data for the video conference will be provided on request by email to oliver.zauzig@hu-berlin.de).

How can science be curated? What (new) museum concepts and practices are needed for exhibiting academic collections and research as well as scientific processes and activities? Three recent science exhibitions and museums are the focus of the previous day: the FORUM FOR SCIENCE, ART AND DOUBT of the Ghent University Museum (open since 2020), the first show “After Nature” of the HUMBOLDT LABORATORY in Berlin’s Humboldt Forum (2021) and the basic exhibition of the Göttingen FORUM WISSEN (2022). What they have in common is the curatorial concern to show science in the making, i.e. the process of knowledge production, and to provide a glimpse behind the scenes to show how scientists research and work. On the one hand, it asks how such processes are (or can be) exhibited and what tensions arise in relation to representative claims. On the other hand, it will be examined which understanding of science is being exposed and which museum concept is being tested.

Dr Daniela Döring is a cultural scientist and post-doctoral researcher at the research college “Wissen | Ausstellen” at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. She previously held academic, curatorial and teaching positions at the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, the Braunschweig Centre for Gender Studies and the Institute for Arts and Media at the University of Potsdam. In her research, she interweaves curatorial practice and academic discourse, focusing on science exhibitions, diversity and gender in museums, body and gender history, and cultural techniques of surveying and datafication.

The event will take place at the HZK (House 3, Gerlachbau next to the Tieranatomischen Theater TAT, Campus Nord, Philippstraße 13) and virtually (Access data for the video conference will be provided on request by email to oliver.zauzig@hu-berlin.de).

Since the 1990s, collecting practices and associated problems such as contamination and toxicity have increasingly come into focus due to the growing ecological and political relevance of objects and materials. However, little epistemic relevance has been attributed to the toxic remains produced during these transformative processes of differentiation, purification and reevaluation.

The presentation provides insight into the process of an artistic research that deals with this marginality by means of asbestos-contaminated objects of a foundation collection and their handling.

Flavia Caviezel is an ethnologist, film scholar and lecturer at the FHNW – Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Institut Experimentelles Design und Medienkulturen in Basel. The work was produced during a research residency 2021-22 at the Matters of Activity cluster at Humboldt University.

The lecture will be held in German.

The event will take place at the HZK (House 3, Gerlachbau next to the Tieranatomischen Theater TAT, Campus Nord, Philippstraße 13) and virtually (Access data for the video conference will be provided on request by email to oliver.zauzig@hu-berlin.de).

Museum Space Knowledge. An Interdisciplinary and Co-laborative Experiment at Humboldt Labor

The exhibition spaces of the Humboldt Laboratory in the Humboldt Forum are conceived as an instrument of knowledge transfer between science and society. The research project “Museum Raum Wissen” (Museum Space Knowledge), funded by the Joachim Herz Foundation, examines this transfer from a spatial perspective in an intersectional way. The aim is to produce insights into the space and architecture of the co-production of knowledge in the museum context and to develop impulses for the design of exhibition spaces. To this end, a ‘co-laborative’ field research at the interface between architecture and social sciences will be carried out in the opening exhibition “Nach der Natur”.

Sarah Etz and Séverine Marguin provide insights into the ongoing project and initial results.

The lecture will be held in German.

The next colloquium will take place on 25 April 2022 at 2 pm and all interested parties are cordially invited!
The event will be held virtually.
Access data for the video conference will be provided on request by email to oliver.zauzig@hu-berlin.de.

The Museum as a Choir: Visitor Reactions to the Multivocality at the Humboldt Forum’s ‘Berlin Global’

This talk by Irene Hilden & Andrei Zavadski will provide insights into the research project ‘Realizations and Reception in the Humboldt Forum,’ based at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
With ethnographic audience research at its root, the project explored how visitors engaged with the Humboldt Forum and its exhibitions during the first weeks of the institution’s operation. The talk will focus on some of the findings related to audience experiences of multivocality as employed in the exhibition ‘Berlin Global.’

The lecture will be held in English.

The next colloquium will take place on 07 February 2022 at 2 pm and all interested parties are cordially invited! The event will be held virtually. Access data for the video conference will be provided on request by email to oliver.zauzig@hu-berlin.de.

Polish Folk Art and the Holocaust: Perpetrator-Victim-Bystander Memory Transactions in the Polish-German Context

The recent turn in Holocaust studies towards the “dispersed” Holocaust that took place outside of the death camps, in full view of local “bystander” populations, requires new sources of data. While oral history has brought important insights into the field, vernacular visual sources have yet to be considered. Holocaust-themed folk art from Poland constitutes an important and as-yet-unexamined source that offers a unique perspective on postwar memorial processes. Created throughout the postwar decades, carvings and paintings of Holocaust scenes by Polish vernacular artists, who remembered pre-war Jews and witnessed the atrocities against them, have been largely forgotten in the holdings of Polish ethnographic museums or reside in private (mostly German) collections, without ever having been systematically examined as a source of knowledge about post-traumatic memory processes.

The project focuses on such vernacular representations of the Shoah, and their impacts and instrumentalizations in East, West, and reunited Germany from 1945 until today, examining their role in Polish and German memory cultures.

The lecture will be held in English.