Category Archives: Colloquium

HZK-CARMAH Colloquium – The Phyletic Museum

What time: 06 February 2023, 2 p.m. right on time.
Where: The event will take place at the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik (Haus 3, Gerlachbau next to the Tieranatomische Theater, 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).

The Phyletic Museum in Jena was founded in 1907 by Ernst Haeckel, who made Charles Darwin’s theories known in Germany. The main theme of the museum is accordingly evolution. In the museum, living and dead animals are related to people of the past and present. The film project accompanies the work of the museum educator and shows her practices in dealing with objects, her interpretation of the (biological) world and the communication of biological knowledge to the public and the student body. The focus is on the history and use of the teaching collection of the Institute of Special Zoology at the University of Jena, which the museum houses – and the small and large irritations that its objects trigger in viewers.

Wolfram Höhne is an author and filmmaker. He works at the interface of art and cultural heritage research. He is currently the academic coordinator of the research training group “Identity and Heritage” at the Bauhaus University Weimar and the Technical University Berlin.

Larissa Förster is a cultural anthropologist working on the (colonial) history of museum and university collections, provenance and restitution research, and questions of postcolonial memory culture. She is an associate member of CARMAH. Together with the historian Holger Stoecker, she wrote the book “Haut, Haar und Knochen. Koloniale Spuren in naturkundlichen Sammlungen der Universität Jena” [engl. transl. “Skin, hair and bones. Colonial Traces in Natural History Collections at the University of Jena”] (2016).

Michael Markert is a historian of science and works on natural science teaching collections and their objects – zoological wall charts, anatomical models, physical apparatus – as well as related topics such as collection ethics and digitisation. He is currently a project manager developing workflows for enriching museum metadata at the Thuringian University and State Library.

The film and lecture are in German.

HZK-CARMAH-Kolloquium am 14. November 2022

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.

Book presentation to celebrate the publication of ”Islam and Heritage in Europe: Pasts, Presents and Future Possibilities”

Book presentation to celebrate the publication of Islam and Heritage in Europe: Pasts, Presents and Future Possibilities.

Looking at diverse trajectories of people and things, the volume examines developments in various parts of Europe, including France, Germany, Russia, Turkey and the Balkans. We will discuss entanglements between heritage, Islam and Europe and ways in which these entanglements have played out against the backdrop of recent developments, such as debates on restitution, decolonising museums or the ‘refugee crisis’.

The roundtable discussion will include inputs from Wendy Shaw, Peter McMurray, Jesko Schmoller, Avi Astor, Diletta Guidi, Banu Karaca, Mirjam Brusius, Christine Gerbich and Rikke Gram, and the editors, Katarzyna Puzon, Sharon Macdonald and Mirjam Shatanawi.

The event will take place in the framework of the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik / CARMAH Colloquium Series.

The event will take place at the HZK (House 3, Gerlachbau next to the Tieranatomischen Theater TAT, Campus Nord, Philippstraße 13: https://www.kulturtechnik.hu-berlin.de/en/contact/) and virtually.

Invitation HZK-CARMAH COLLOQUIUM on June 27, 2022, at 2 p.m.

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.

Invitation HZK-CARMAH COLLOQUIUM on June 13, 2022, at 2 p.m.

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.

Invitation HZK-CARMAH COLLOQUIUM on May 23, 2022, at 2 p.m.

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).

The DFG-funded research project „Curating Digital Images: Ethnographic Perspectives on the Affordances of Digital Images in Heritage and Museum Contexts“ deals with the question of how digital images transform the museum experience. Two interconnected empirical studies explore these transformations ethnographically. The first study takes a close look at how digital images from museum databases are downloaded, shared, and dealt with in people’s everyday lives. The second study concentrates on digital image practices in the physical museum and seeks to understand how visitor-photographs taken in museums are curated and contextualized on social media platforms. An eye-tracking study furthermore gives interesting insights on how interdisciplinary collaboration with information science can enhance ethnography and shows how the human eye plays into curatorial practice processes.

Katharina Geis & Sarah Ulrich will give insights into the empirical studies and present the research results.

The lecture will be held in English.

Invitation HZK-CARMAH COLLOQUIUM on 25. April 2022 – The Museum as a Choir: Visitor Reactions to the Multivocality at the Humboldt Forum’s ‘Berlin Global’

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.

Invitation HZK-CARMAH COLLOQUIUM on 07 February 2022 – Polish Folk Art and the Holocaust

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.

Invitation HZK-CARMAH Colloquium on 10 January 2022 – BUA-Project “Digital Network Collections”

The next colloquium will take place on 10 January 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.

BUA-Project “Digital Network Collections”

University collections are a valuable resource for research, teaching, and outreach. The basis for their use, however, is digital indexing and better visibility, especially in the direction of a multidisciplinary target group. There is still a great need for development in this area. The location of Berlin, with its university collections in the Berlin University Alliance (BUA) and diverse relationships with museums and research institutions in the city, offers a particularly fruitful context.

The project “Digital Network Collections” deals with the conceptual planning of a digital network of Berlin’s university collections in the BUA in order to create a common interdisciplinary basis that enables the research and digital evidence of objects. Conceptual work and concrete use cases are combined: Modular components are tested in practical case studies, e.g. for the preparation of legacy data and finding aids, the referencing of subject data or the virtual presentation of holdings.

The lecture will be held in German.

INVITATION HZK-CARMAH COLLOQUIUM ON 6 December 2021, 2 P.M., Online. “Mindscape.” Insights into a project between politics, research and cultural production

The next colloquium will take place on 6 December 2021 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.

Initiated and funded by the UK Wellcome Trust, Mindscapes is a cultural project that aims to support a transformation in how we understand, address and talk about mental health. Margareta von Oswald will present Mindscapes and open it up for discussion.

For more information, visit the Mindscapes project website.

The lecture will be held in English.