Missing Links: Object Manipulation In (Post)Colonial Context

The aim of this section is to place the debates on the restitution of colonial looted art, which have been in progress for a good ten years, against the broader backdrop of post-colonial thing theory and viewer-response criticism and relate them to the current concepts of global art and world art history. It is about taking a new and differentiated look at the historical and current participants, the wishes and categories in the forced transculturalisation of artefacts and art terms, collecting and presentation styles. In the colonial context the usual forms of decontextualisation and recontextualisation of mobile objects and their permanent reinterpretation in historical cycles of reception adopt a particular character of force, which implicitly entails a destruction of indigenous cultures. The section asks, firstly, about differing forms of material, medial and imaginary appropriation of extra-European objects in the context of colonial power structures and, secondly, about the consequences of their loss for the formerly colonised societies. The contradiction between, on the one hand, the policy of total mobilisation of objects as practised by European museums and, on the other hand, the restrictions which the mobility of the subjects of their countries of origin are subject to draws attention to neo-colonial tendencies in cultural globalisation and questions the function of Museums of World Cultures. Ultimately it is about postcolonial strategies beyond national identity policies, as they are being developed at the present time, above all by artists, but also by academics, curators and a critical museum public. The section is divided up into the following subjects:

• Looting, loss and restitution
• Beyond restitution: theoretical approaches and postcolonial thing-theory
• Imaginary looting and symbolic appropriation
• Subjects as objects
• Postcolonial interventions