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Decentring the Museum

Contemporary Art Institutions and Colonial Legacies

Nina Möntmann author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd

Published:1st Sep '23

Should be back in stock very soon

Decentring the Museum cover

Nina Möntmann's timely book extends the decolonisation debate to the institutions of contemporary art. In a thoughtfully articulated text, illustrated with pertinent examples of best practice, she argues that to play a crucial role within increasingly diverse societies museums and galleries of contemporary art have a responsibility to 'decentre' their institutions, removing from their collections, exhibition policies and infrastructures a deeply embedded Euro-centric cultural focus with roots in the history of colonialism. In this, she argues, they can learn from the example both of anthropological museums (such as the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne), which are engaged in debates about the colonial histories of their collections, about trauma and repair, and of small-scale art spaces (such as La Colonie, Paris, ANO, Institute of Arts and Knowledge, Accra or Savvy Contemporary, Berlin), which have the flexibility, based on informal infrastructures, to initiate different kinds of conversation and collective knowledge production in collaboration with indigenous or local diasporic communities from the Global South.

 For the first time, this book identifies the influence that anthropological museums and small art spaces can exert on museums of contemporary art to initiate a process of decentring.

'This book provides important solutions for making art and anthropological museums culturally relevant. It proposes an expansive model of museology grounded in notions of repair and healing and in practices of restoration and restitution, offering a distinct vision for the future of museums. Summing Up: Highly recommended.' – L. Estevez, Winston-Salem State University, CHOICE

ISBN: 9781848225503

Dimensions: 200mm x 130mm x 15mm

Weight: unknown

144 pages