Matters of Perspective at the Humboldt Forum

Abstract

In this exhibition review I discuss the curatorial choices employed in the installation Matters of Perspective in the Humboldt Forum’s Ethnological Museum, Berlin. I examine the exhibition’s key framing elements, analyze the sub-installation entitled Das Deutsche in mir ist indirekt, and conclude with a discussion of the adjacent artwork Township Wall, interpreting its role in shaping perceptions about the African collections. I argue that Matters of Perspective is strident in revealing aspects of the German colonial past pertinent to the encounter with ethnological collections at a time of roiling public debate. It boldly introduces historical issues of race, difference, and German colonial legacies, and does especially well at profiling socialist histories of transnational solidarity during the Cold War. Yet, overall, the exhibition deals in a language of contrition that, while familiar in a German cultural context, from other vantage points may appear to some viewers as more self-congratulatory than critical. In other words, the exhibition’s framing of perspectives is rather out of focus with the substantive matters of power, history, and structural racism at stake when addressing colonial legacies in a museum setting such as this one.