Nina Möntmanns 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.
Nina Möntmann is Professor of Art Theory at the University of Cologne, and curator, writer and PI at the Global South Study Center (GSSC) at the University of Cologne. Her previous publications include Kunst als Sozialer Raum and the edited volumes Brave New Work: A Reader on Harun Farocki’s film A New Product’, Scandalous: A Reader on Art & Ethics, New Communities and Art and Its Institutions.
Foreword; Introduction: Why Decentre Museums, and Why Now?; 1 The Colonial Dilemma of the Modern Museum; 2 Central Theoretical Concepts: From Decolonising to Decentring; 3 Repairing the Anthropological Museum; 4 Decolonial Sensibilities and Decentring Practices of Small-Scale Art Organisations; 5 The Contemporary Art Museum: Between the Anthropological Museum and Small Art Spaces; Epilogue: Decentred Museums as Infrastructures of People; Further Reading; Index
In this lucid book Nina Möntmann confronts the residual legacies of colonialism in contemporary art. She astutely reminds us that this task will entail more than the restitution of objects held in the center or the hiring of new agents from the peripheries. Möntmann makes a compelling case for a radical and imaginative mode of decentring the museum. No-one in the artworld can ignore this argument. - Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne
From the unique position of an academic and curator, Nina Möntmann provides rich insights into institutions with exemplary models that move away from hegemonic stances to embrace a new order in museology. – Peju Layiwola, Artist and Professor of Art History, University of Lagos
