On the evening of 26
November, the virtual common space of Birkbeck’s Centre for Museum Cultures and
UCL’s PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical) was filled with almost two hundred virtual
guests. They came to discuss the impact of the exhibition which had stirred the
audiences and museum corridors in Poland ten years ago, and which reverberates
in the museum world until the present. Ars Homo Erotica, curated by Paweł
Leszkowicz, and shown at The National Museum in Warsaw from
June to August 2010 was the first large scale exhibition which openly championed
the equality of the LGBTQ+ community in
Poland by demonstrating the endurance of homoerotic themes and aesthetics in art across time and space. It was also
a manifesto of the Critical Museum, the new model of the museum institution which,
rejecting neutrality claims, takes an active part in the struggle for equality
and pluri-versality. The concept of the Critical Museum, which anticipates the current
radicalisation of the definition of the museum, was devised by the then Director of the Warsaw Museum, Professor Piotr
Piotrowski (1953-2015), the author of ground-breaking books about
Eastern European avant-gardes. This event was devoted to his memory.
Ars Homo Erotica: Ten Years
Later was organised by Piotrowski’s Deputy at the Warsaw
museum at that time, Kasia Murawska-Muthesius, Birkbeck, co-editor, with Piotr
Piotrowski, of the book on the Critical
Museum, in co-operation with the originators of the Perverting
the Power Vertical series of seminars at UCL: Michal Murawski, SEES/ UCL,
Masha Mileeva of The Courtauld Institute of Art, and Denis Maksimov.
The event, moderated by
Michal Murawski, assembled a panel of distinguished speakers, from Poland,
Britain and the US, all of them either directly or indirectly involved in the
exhibition. The Curator of Ars Homo Erotica Paweł Leszkowicz presented
the political agenda of the exhibition and its scenario, made of sections
focused on homoerotic themes in art, such as ‘Male
Nude’, ‘Saint Sebastian’, ‘Lesbian Imaginarium’, ‘Transgender’, and history,
from ‘Homoerotic Classicism’ to ‘The Time
of Struggle’, focused on art and LGBT activism in East Central Europe. He also
claimed that the operation of queering museum collections, initiated in Warsaw,
should be continued in all museums, all the way up to Vatican. Maura
Reilly, who listed the exhibition among the most significant shows on gender
issues in her award-winning book Curatorial
Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating, contextualised Ars
Homo Erotica’s impact in Poland within the politics of the feminist and
LGBTQ+ movement. The philosopher and civic activist Tomek Kitliński, and the Scottish
painter Angus Reid, whose exhibition of gay male nudes Parallel
Lives is now on show at Summerhall, Edinburgh, talked about
the current protests in Poland, focusing on the
political dimension of gender and queer in Eastern Europe. Anastasiia
Fedorova presented her Instagram exhibition of the Russian
queer revolution. Finally, Kasia Perlak, a Polish artist
active in London, showed extracts from her poignant films which rework the most
heteronormative forms of culture, folk songs and
the wedding ceremony, as
sites of queer resistance, amidst the escalation of homophobic violence in
Poland. Lively discussions followed. Among the topics raised were the political
dimension of queer, the issue of intersectionality brought up by Erica Lehrer,
the concept of curating love, as well as the idea of nomadic shows in provinces
untangling and endorsing homoerotic love, proposed by Natalia Romik. The
informal conversation with Sarah Wilson ran long after the event was officially
closed. A recording of the event, by William Haggerty, is accessible at Ars Homo
Erotica – Ten Years Later.
Ars Homo Erotica at the National Museum of Warsaw.
The event was organised jointly by Birkbeck’s Centre for Museum Cultures; PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical), a research and art platforms based at the FRINGE Centre (UCL SSEES/Institute for Advanced Studies) and The Courtauld Institute of Art.
On 1 March the Centre for Museum Cultures hosted what proved to be an engaging and animated lecture by Wendy Shaw, Professor of the Art History of Islamic Cultures at the Free University of Berlin.
Shaw opened her talk with images of birds with multi-hued plumes preserved in their thousands at a natural history museum in Berlin, describing the systematic collection of thousands of creatures culled from various parts of the world and now housed in a form of feathered purgatory. She described the cabinet storage and display strategies designed for the delectation of the western gaze as the entombment of dead objects in the museum.
The speaker drew parallels between the collection, categorisation, curation and display of these artefacts and the processes that now define Islamic art in the museum space. She observed the lingering presence of Hegelian approaches to the production of history, and specifically art history, in modern curatorial practices. Hegel’s Philosophy of History in particular, a lecture series given in alternating years starting in 1823 delineated, she explained, a vision of history that naturalises empire, emphasising the racial and geographical superiority of the West over the East, and of Protestant Christianity over everything else.
Highlighting the colonial legacies of museums, Shaw noted that the acquisition and categorisation of objects had been carried out without an understanding of the cultures concerned. Pointing to the mismatch between the original purposes of collections of material artefacts and the manner of their display today, she underlined the necessity of acknowledging and critiquing Hegel’s legacy within the museum context. No number of contemporary exhibitions or the rewriting of museum narratives can change these structures of empire that remain embedded within the episteme she contended, arguing that the decolonisation of minds can only be achieved by the rewriting of institutional structures, not merely words.
Shaw noted that while the category of Islamic Art emerged largely in Germanic art historical discourse, with the emigration of several of its proponents to the United States the essentialist biases of several writers, curators and critics began to shape the ways in which Islamic art has been understood in the ‘West’. She argued that through these practices, and the processes of modernity, such material objects – now absorbed within notions of a ‘universal’ language of art – were effectively rendered silent. Raising the question of how to recover the voices of such worlds, Shaw problematised the development of contemporary exhibition strategies. A lively exchange of views and questions followed the lecture.
Dr Vazken Davidian
Dr Davidian recently completed his PhD at Birkbeck on the subject of The Figure of the Bantoukhd Hamal of Constantinople: Late Nineteenth-Century Representations of Migrant Workers from Ottoman Armenia.
From 11 to 13 October 2018, indigenous and non-indigenous researchers and curators gathered at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin to discuss the opportunities and challenges of co-curating ethnographic collections in the new Amazonian gallery at the Humboldt Forum, due to open in 2019. During three days of unexpectedly hot and sunny weather, participants remained indoors debating intensely key questions: How can museum collections be more openly available to indigenous researchers? How can collections from Amazonia be appropriately preserved? What are the potentialities and drawbacks of digital knowledge bases? What is the value of historic collections to contemporary indigenous peoples? How can educational experiences based on objects in Amazonia be connected to public engagement activities in Berlin? What are the advantages and risks of using audio-visual resources to enable the visualization and circulation of ways of making, using and understanding artefacts? What is the role of mediating institutions (universities, NGOs, etc) in establishing collaborative research projects with museums and source communities, and what are their pitfalls? What is the role of community museums and how can the Berlin Museum work collaboratively with them?
Sharing their experiences, ideas and reflections (in Spanish, Portuguese and German), participants discussed collaborative projects involving indigenous communities in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico, with museums and universities in Germany, the UK and US. What became evident was the dynamism of the indigenous initiatives and their willingness to reconnect with the collections in European and North American museums. These initiatives aimed to reanimate museum artefacts through a revalorization of their respective ways of knowing and inhabiting the world. For indigenous communities, such artefacts are relevant to the extent that, through them, and their associated documentation, the languages, chants, and ancestral knowledge are reactivated, becoming a catalyst for strengthening their social, environmental and cultural heritage. Recognition of their rights to auto-representation is key to a successful cross-cultural exchange. While the asymmetries of power reflected in the making of the collections are clearly still present in varying degrees, the symposium showed that building bridges is still possible, and much desired. Concluding with the “dance of the moths,” a performance which celebrated the transformational possibilities of transatlantic crossings, the main message of this event was that cross-cultural dialogue is central to the process of displaying historic ethnographic collections. Dr Andrea Scholz, the Humboldt Forum curator who organised this symposium, is to be commended for her openness and determination to enable other voices to be heard. While the City Palace that will house the Humboldt Forum has generated considerable controversy, let us hope that its displays reflect the novel curatorial practices discussed at this symposium.
