INTRO-
SPECTING
INSTI-
TUTIONS
By associating events with institutional programs, the public nature of a particular format is linked only to the infrastructures necessary for it to become public. Can formats such as residencies, talks, or conferences create insights that go beyond the infrastructures required that allow assignments to be rearranged?
The assignment of institutional holdings to the online collection turns objects into digital copies. Does this assignment not only transform the media approach, but also the objects themselves?
Exhibits seem to remain silent until they are charged with language: Through guided tours, exhibition texts, or titles. How can this supposed silence itself be articulated? How can it be used to make public voids and inconsistencies within the historical reappraisal of collections?
As a rule, the organizational structure of institutions is hardly (or not at all) accessible to the public. Nevertheless, publics are produced on its basis. Can a person create access to their everyday work and thus open up a public debate about the production conditions of their institutional practice?
The scientific processing of collection holdings provides classifications of the object from a specific cultural and historical context. The status of an object is thus defined. How can this processing also create a new status, that is, a contextualization that defines not only the object but also the collection itself?
For the mediation of exhibitions, the scientific processing of objects forms an important basis. What would an unscientific processing look like – a subversive, subcultural, and non-official form of processing that could be used to tell an informal or disruptive form of object history?
Within exhibitions, different locations become visible primarily through exhibits that come from different cultural and historical contexts. Is their publicity also reflected by the visitors who view them – and who encounter them with different social and cultural contexts?
The title of a project creates social access: through it, exclusion and inclusion to various program points are controlled. How can mediation work extend this regulation set by titles, invalidate it, or counter it with something new?
The storage of objects requires work that is not visible itself. However, it materializes in the condition of the objects: How and where things are stored affects their condition. How is the material of objects that are stored in institutional archives protected in relation to the maintenance of the cabinets, display cases, and storage systems in which they are kept?
Can the scholarly processing of individual artifacts make visible the entanglement of museums in their colonial past? How can the treatment of artifacts articulate the entanglements that are rooted not only in their provenance, but also specifically in their exhibition history?
Work processes materialize not only in the results they produce, but also in the traces they leave behind. Is it possible to understand the thought processes of a symposium as material, in terms of a social texture that can continue to grow?
Does the assignment of objects to certain categories already create their own narrative? Can the labels and symbols used to sort and classify objects in collections be used in a similar way as dramaturgical devices used to stage objects in collections?
The location of an exhibition reflects both its position in an institutional network and its geopolitical space. It thus establishes relationships with different museums and collections. How can the point from which an exhibition is made visible be conveyed as this system of relationships?
What history can the processing of objects from no longer existing communities refer to, if no more stories can be told in these communities themselves? Can forms of processing be developed that are dedicated to the stories that were told with objects?
A person in institutions has different roles: A person can be a collaborator, a participant, or an observer. Can a critical perspective on one’s own work processes be produced through the intersection of these roles?
The assignment of objects to collection areas creates connections between different human and non-human actors. How can these assignments become not only functional, but also critical? Through their involvement in databases, workspaces, and repositories, how do they create networking effects that bring diverse perspectives to light?
Collections and archives are not only composed of objects and classification systems, but, at the same time, of seemingly non-archival aspects. These can be feelings, affects, or conflicts that develop through the collecting of objects and the indexing of holdings. How do these dimensions become legitimate material for a collection?
The articulation of the past, a violent history of collections, for example, can identify the colonial period as a process that has not been completed. How can this presence of the past also tell stories that result from current actions, conversations, and embodied knowledge – and thus are themselves part of the institution?
Colonial violence lies not only in the history recorded in documents and told in books, but also in the categories and forms in which that violence materializes. How can these categories themselves be understood and decolonized as historical material – and thus registers, symbols, buzzwords, and systems of classification be examined for their colonial past?
In institutions, assignments are made on the basis of object classifications that determine the time, place, and context of objects. How can these assignments be overridden by different mediation strategies and how can new spaces be described and new stories be told?
The assignment of objects to different collections, systems, and categories produces specific historical and cultural readings of those objects. By delimiting an object’s story in these readings, other possible stories are left out. How can assignments uncover new approaches that traverse different, perhaps contradictory, categories and elude clear legibility?
In institutions, the occupation of a person is supposed to represent certain guidelines, such as inclusion or diversity. How can this staffing policy be translated into a practice that is also lived out in the micropolitics of a workday, an exhibition concept, or a coffee break?
The location of institutions is more than a neutral spatial coordinate: It creates reference systems of geopolitically and historically evolved power. In this way, locations implicitly define center and periphery. How can institutional outreach and their work with diverse communities critically negotiate this power complex?
If activities in institutions become permanent, which persons are involved in this permanence? Does the organization of these activities take place collaboratively and decentrally or are they controlled and limited by hierarchies?
How does the title of objects reflect a language shaped by imperial violence, and how can their inclusion in exhibitions formulate new contexts whose mediation not only linguistically names but also discusses that violence?
The outreach of an institution usually concerns sites that are beyond the exhibition. They reach locations that have their own infrastructures and organize themselves as a community. How can these relationships be incorporated into the outreach of institutions, in order to put processes within their own infrastructures up for discussion?
In institutions, work processes are not measured by the exhaustion that they produce, but by the result that they can show. Are there infrastructures within institutions that use time less as a measured value and more as a space of perception in which work and leisure form a common entity?
Exhibitions of ethnographic collections predominantly attract people who already have specialized knowledge or interest. The predominant location of institutions within urban societies contributes to this. How can the mediation of exhibitions break through the social boundaries of their own location?
Affects materialize in collection and archival holdings when objects cannot be viewed or cared for due to personal concern. An example of this is the art of National Socialism or historical advertising images that reproduce racism and abuse during the colonial era. How can this consternation be understood as material that marks the objects and becomes visible with them?
Communication channels are based on the event program of institutions. This is, among other things, archived according to their chronological order. If the chronological determination of time in archives is understood as a moment of Eurocentric historiography, how can alternative, cyclical views of time be adopted in the event archives of institutions?
Objects are not only shaped by work, but also take on the form of the work they perform: A knife is not only sharpened, but also dulled by cutting. So how does working with objects reflect their material? How can traces of colonial violence be sought not only in the material of the object, but also in the materialization of its use?
Allocating work processes to different institutional areas creates infrastructures based on the division of labor that are oriented towards efficiency. This optimizes processes, but limits perspectives on their respective areas. How can the assignment of working steps reveal new perspectives rather than simply define them?? How can perspectives be organized collaboratively and transdisciplinarily?
How does the presence of an exhibition build a particular world or multiple worlds? And how can the past and the future also flow into this visualization of new or alternative possibilities of the world?
Time spent together opens a space that makes knowledge tangible through shared relationships and affective behavior. In this way, time creates access, but only if social infrastructures are available that enable informal gatherings and indefinite exchanges. How can time materialize as an affect that promotes such informal infrastructures?
Infrastructures are dependent on the processes that take place within them. They are therefore both fragile and consolidating. How can the organizational structure of institutions operate openly and flexibly on the one hand, and on the other hand offer stability and security to a person working within it?
The presence of artists in residency programs can create friction with the rules of an institution, for example when research objects are not allowed to be made accessible. How can the presence of artists address these institutional settings and thus have an impact on the rules of an institution?
Can the improvement of working conditions counteract a continuation of Western museum history and its colonial imprint? What influence do factors such as salary, democratic participation in decision-making processes, working hours and climate have on the content-related processing of colonial holdings?
The material of objects describes not only a given substance, but also a material condition, a technique inscribed in matter. The description “polished wood” expresses above all an action that materializes – and thus equally a relationship to people and things with which this materialization was realized. How can this material implication be conveyed? How can it be included in the categorization of objects?
Project work is assigned to different areas in institutions that treat aspects of the program differently; public relations, mediation, and archiving follow their own infrastructures. How can these assignments create permeability so that flexible structures emerge?
In the mediation of exhibitions, there are narratives that are addressed almost incidentally and do not have their own place in the mediation program. Nevertheless, they make statements about how to deal with the presence of a colonial heritage. How can these seemingly incidental narratives find a permanent place in mediation?
If in capitalist societies there is a correlation between so-called creative, immaterial labor and the nature of their conditions of production, how does the immaterial labor of an individual person materialize in the infrastructures of an institution?
Curating and mediating exhibitions often take place separately: Most often, mediation is seen as a secondary step that follows a curatorial concept. How can these two processes be conceived and executed together from the ground up? How can the location of an exhibition create its own space from this interface?
Objects in collections acquire historical, cultural, and social meaning through their titles. The apparent immutability of these titles contrasts with their own contextual conditionality. Can titles in collections be changed to express this conditionality? Can multiple titles be provided to an object to make different readings and contexts visible?
“Worlded publics” are among other things organized through the terms and labels that predominate in collections. They give exhibits specific titles that establish relationships to communities and shape linguistic styles in mediation work. How can naming objects take up this mediation? How can publics be established when decolonization has a different meaning depending on the public?
When historical artifacts are shown in exhibitions, the context in which they become public changes. Time is thus used as a torque that mobilizes colonial history and the present. How can this momentum be staged not as a look at the past, but as an active involvement with it?
The presence of exhibitions can be seen as a kind of front stage upon which current ways of dealing with collections and holdings are shown. This presence implies an absent backstage from which programmatic decisions are made and problematic objects are left out. Are there possibilities to make aspects of the backstage present in exhibitions in order to be able to take a critical stance towards one’s own exhibition policy?
Within exhibitions, above all, one’s perspective provides orientation: It creates relationships between exhibits and visitors. How can a guided tour orient this relationship in a way that one’s own location is discussed in addition to the perspectives that accompany it? How can specific locations within guided tours promote critical and dialogical formats?
Institutions determine locations for objects when they are archived and stored. These locations seem to have nothing to do with the presentations in exhibitions; a showcase and a cabinet follow different politics of visibility. How can these locations be placed in relation to each other? How can the politics of visibility also accommodate a politics of invisibility?
The placement of objects in institutional collections requires that things are no longer used on an everyday basis. How can the time and place of a collection not only name the past of objects, but also their relationship to the present? How can this create a new form of use?
Institutional processes are tied to working hours. If employees in institutions have to fill this time with internal procedures and demands to such an extent that little attention can be paid to inquiries from outside, how can the presence of an institution be more than the mediation and communication program that is planned in advance and discussed internally? How can an institution communicate its program in unplanned conversations?
When objects are dated and classified for collections, time is broken down into individual epochs and areas. This decomposition produces historiography. Instead of fragmenting time, how can connections be made? Can time be negotiated in institutions as a living narrative rather than a dated history?
Collection presentations are based on historical and content-related links that stage history as a plausible narrative. How can the conception of future exhibitions challenge this narrative? How can a plausible narrative be understood and criticized as a violent claim on past time?
How can artist residencies deal with the sometimes problematic holdings of ethnographic collections? How can their short-term presence make visible critical perspectives on the invisible power relations in collections and archives?
The title of objects is a supposedly objective designation, as long as something is stored and arranged within a collection. As soon as the object is exhibited, this title turns into a setting that makes the object an exhibit. How can the titling of objects within a collection also be understood as such a setting, as an act that is structurally fixed but personally performed?
To create different publics, people need to be mobilized. How can a person be addressed who does not fit into a homogeneous group, but rather needs different mediation concepts to gain access to knowledge?
Objects are not only processed, but are also process themselves: When objects are categorized, discussed, and sorted, social processes such as conversations and research materialize beyond the object. The processing of objects can thus be understood as networked knowledge, with connections between human and non-human actors materializing.How can these materializations feed back into the registers of collections?
How can history in institutions of the present be researched, documented, and published critically if the current working time itself is hardly criticized in terms of its exploitative structures of time and labor? Against this background, how can a changed approach to time reflect the production and working conditions?
Titles are often functional designations to organize collections. They thus obscure the fact that every titling performs an action, confers a status, and emerges from processes. Titles are performative in this sense, because they put abstract concepts into action. How can this performative dimension be used in exhibitions? How can the title of things be experienced as an action?
What is the relationship between collectively-experienced publics and the individual responsibilities and preferences of a person who participates in them? Can personal aspects be made visible without undermining common conditions of participation?
The processing of collections corresponds to a form of knowledge production in which objects are not only classified, but their individual nature is also determined. How can this determination go beyond the single object and be made visible as networked and tacit knowledge?
The title of an object in ethnographic collections often refers to practices of everyday use, such as knife, cup, or vase. But how are these everyday actions implicated in patriarchal or colonial relations that are not articulated in the title? Can these relations be incorporated into the title?
In the course of digitizing collections, objects are incorporated into an immaterial data system that classifies material in different ways. How can the digitization process itself be understood as a form of materialization, as a process that transfers objects and data into a reciprocal materialization?
How can collections that are criticized for being exotistic incorporate this criticism into the scholarly processing of individual collection objects? Is there a decolonial form of object processing – and if so, would it necessarily be scientifically legitimized?
In the mediation of exhibitions, relationships to objects and collections become tangible through the sharing of knowledge about them. How can these relationships create a presence of their own, a presence that is not only in the mediation, but also one that forms relationships within the collections?