Nothing in the Humboldt Forum, which opens in full this Friday, is as surprising as a few punctuation marks in one of the wall texts. The words “acquisitions” and “collections” are to be read here in quotation marks, the Ethnological Museum, which is now opening the last areas on the second and third floors together with the Museum of Asian Art, exposes its entire existence as questionable to mendacious with this tiny intervention. More radical than even the most vocal advocates of restitution would do.
However, this small but radical gesture can only be found in the Benin Hall, which had to be renovated in a hurry in recent months because Germany decided in June to take ownership of everyone Benin bronzes, which are stored in the German museums with the largest Benin holdings, to Nigeria. Of 514 Benin pieces that Berlin owned, 168 will remain on loan for ten years, only 40 are on display. With the dramatic development – no other country has so far brought about a similar step – the old exhibition concept was also outdated. It is not the glorious history of the Kingdom of Benin and its art that is being told, but the history of restitution. The heavy pedestal, on which the heads were to be presented like on an altar, could no longer be rebuilt, but thanks to a lot of white paint and bright light, the objects are now – quite appropriately – set up there like confiscated stolen goods at a customs press conference.
Instead of the expected four million people, only 1.5 million came in the first year
You can see the hurry in the hall. Nevertheless, he is one of the very few who are not filled with helplessness and despondency. Here the story of the throne is told Oba Akenzua II. Reclaimed from the Germans in 1935. (He was given a copy, which he still had to pay for.) Here you can see the documentary film “Euch Statuary Die” by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, which promoted restitutions as early as 1953 and lamented the death of the objects in the showcases. Magazines, flyers and merchandise from the Nigerian festival Festac 77, a key event in African cultural self-reflection, are on display here. The only annoying thing is the conversation between activists and officials from Nigeria and German museum people, which was staged using a multi-channel video, in which, for example, Herman Parzingerthe President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, as an advocate of restitutions, although, in the tradition of his predecessors in office, he dismissed the demands for them as a “summer issue” in 2017.
A Queen Mother altarpiece from the Kingdom of Benin in modern-day Nigeria.
(Photo: Alexander Schippel/National Museums in Berlin, Ethnological Museum / Humboldt Forum Foundation in the Berlin Sch)
But the pop-up room also makes it clear how conceptually lost the rest of the house is. All ethnological museums have been in an existential crisis for a long time. The smaller the world has become, the more often we encounter foreign “peoples” and “cultures” quite simply as people, be it on vacation or in Berlin, in refugee camps, as colleagues, at school, the more absurd it seems, their cultural testimonies meticulous to collect and display like insects. If the Humboldt Forum had a task, it was to find a way out of this dilemma. Why, then, does it show 50 pairs of Native American moccasins without giving the slightest insight? Why is a room titled “Aspects of Islam” with a shrug of the shoulders, instead of telling a story about Islamophobia or radical Islamism, for example? “We don’t see the collection as a burden, but as an opportunity,” Parzinger announced at the press conference on Thursday – and inadvertently admitted how difficult it was for him and his employees to reconcile the thousands of old things with the “new discourse”. , which he wants to “dare” – in the future that the Humboldt Forum has been pushing forward since its invention 20 years ago.
The fact that these discourses do not take place here, that Parzinger only seems to occur to him at the press conference and that “migration, hunger crises, climate change” could also be negotiated here, is probably one of the reasons why the first year of the Humboldt Forum was anything but “successful ” was how General Manager Hartmut Dorgerloh enthused. Instead of the expected four million people, only 1.5 million came, and only 820,000 saw the exhibitions. The events went unanswered. Quite a few artists and scientists are embarrassed to perform here.
Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth called the Humboldt Forum a “construction site”, just like Frank-Walter Steinmeier did a year ago
Only rarely do the exhibition organizers succeed in more than the expert accumulation of the significant and the typical. The room with the collection of Francis La Flesche is an example, who was born on the Umoho reservation in Nebraska, was both an ethnologist and an indigenous person and sold 60 objects of his culture to the Berlin museum at the end of the 19th century. His descendants in Nebraska, who also have their say here, knew nothing more about it.
Many of the exhibits don’t even need a concept, they are so fascinating: the cave of the ring-carrying pigeons, for example, the huge fabric painting “Lienzo Seler”, which was one of the most spectacular pieces in the old Dahlem museum, or a small “magic house” from Palau, the has never been exhibited before. But the sum here is less than its parts. The lack of direction throughout the enterprise reduces the impact of even the grandest of objects.
This also has to do with the architecture. How much the castle facade stands in the way of the project has often been written. However, it is also becoming increasingly clear how unsuccessful the exhibition architecture is. The clumsy showcases in the gray halls are just as indecisive as the exhibition organizers have been in recent years, far too heavy and far too expensive. There are halls that seem to turn their backs on you and others in which the art completely disappears into the infrastructure. Some halls contain enough exhibits for a sophisticated museum exhibition, complemented by a storm of wall texts, interactive screens, videos and QR codes for even more information. In another, five historic photos of the Silk Road are lost. Why? One does not know. Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth called the Humboldt Forum a “construction site”, just like Frank-Walter Steinmeier did a year ago. But eternal becoming does not replace a concept.