Problematics of Democratizing Curatorial Power in the Royal Museum for Central Africa's Online Collection ; Problematika demokratizacije kustoske moći u online kolekciji Kraljevskog muzeja središnje Afrike

What do a nineteenth-century ethnographic exhibit and a twenty-first-century museum website tool have in common? More than one might expect. Belgium’s 1897 International Exposition included a colonial exposition that displayed panoplies and dioramas of items taken under colonial violence in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These objects came to form the initial collection for Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa, an institution that has in recent years underwent a period of renovation and expansion (reopening in 2018) with the aim of revisiting its history and displays.... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Kiefer, Hannah
Dokumenttyp: Text
Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
Verlag/Hrsg.: Institute of Art History
Zagreb
Schlagwörter: digital curation / Belgian Congo / world’s fair / museum community engagement / panoply display / colonial ethnography / digitalno kuriranje / Belgijski Kongo / Svjetska izložba 1897. / društveni angažman / revijalni postav (panoply display) / kolonijalna etnografija
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27312299
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://hrcak.srce.hr/246893

What do a nineteenth-century ethnographic exhibit and a twenty-first-century museum website tool have in common? More than one might expect. Belgium’s 1897 International Exposition included a colonial exposition that displayed panoplies and dioramas of items taken under colonial violence in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These objects came to form the initial collection for Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa, an institution that has in recent years underwent a period of renovation and expansion (reopening in 2018) with the aim of revisiting its history and displays. To create engagement with the museum, its website has offered a feature that allows visitors to curate virtual image boards of objects from the collection, with resulting effects semantically linked to the 1897 Brussels exposition. This online tool, while stemming from an admirable impulse to share curatorial control, falls short by juxtaposing items that tell of traumatic histories with no criticality or contextualizing information. Analyses of visual configurations of this tool, along with comparative examinations of the 1897 displays, offer evidence for this argument, as well as an example of how collections that represent painful histories call for especially thoughtful design of digital, publicfacing tools. ; Ovaj rad propituje i kritizira vizualne efekte primjene revijalnoga muzejskog postava [panoply display], bez ikakvih kontekstualnih informacija, u dva povezana slučaja. Prva je kolonijalna izložba na belgijskoj Svjetskoj izložbi 1897. godine, na kojoj je tisuće predmeta iz belgijskog Konga bilo izloženo u skupinama formiranima po estetskom načelu, bez pripadajućih legendi, često ambijentalno popraćenima skulpturama i muralima suvremene belgijske izrade. Drugi slučaj ovakvog načina izlaganja koji se razmatra u članku značajka je jedne internetske stranice na kojoj korisnici sami biraju digitalne prikaze različitih predmeta iz muzejske zbirke poput afričkih ritualnih predmeta, oruđa i primjeraka životinja te ...