Beatrice von Bismarck
Beatrice von Bismarck speaks of the creation of the MA programme Cultures of the Curatorial and the involvement of the course participants in the curatorial project The Subjective Object. The project dealt with an archive of anthropological photography from the late 1920s of the Adivasi people of India and the political and socio-historical issues related to this archive. Several key questions are raised regarding colonialism, the anthropological gaze, the role of museums, the status of exhibits, the role of photography in relation to communal memory, and the ontological standing of the photograph itself.
Synthesis
Producing art and archives out of existing archives · The Subjective Object · The culture of a curatorial course · A project under the conditions of institutional limitations or perspectives · Expand…
Producing art and archives out of existing archives · The Subjective Object · The culture of a curatorial course · A project under the conditions of institutional limitations or perspectives · How do things work within state institutions and how do we want to make them work in a different way? · Problematising the German photographic archive on the Adivasi of India in the Leipzig Museum of Ethnography · How can something so reproducible and unoriginal and not object-like be repatriated? · To bring that encounter in documented form back to Germany · The images helped create the Adivasi Academy in India · What has the photograph turned to? · What kind of item are we looking at? · Is this a document? · Is this in fact an object of the ancestors? · Is this a representation that equals the status of the ancestors? · The museum itself as an invention of the West now transplanted to India · The constantly shifting status of the image · How do you feed them back into a process of reading and rereading and even reconstructing a history through a constant rereading? · What can images actually do? · What do objects do? · How does meaning attach itself to images that gets shed away again through different contextualisation? · How can images become agents?
Short biography
Beatrice von Bismarck, professor of art history and visual culture at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, is the co-founder and co-director of the project space Expand…
Beatrice von Bismarck, professor of art history and visual culture at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, is the co-founder and co-director of the project space Kunstraum der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg and of the project space /D/O/C/K at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. She initiated and co-directs the MA programme Cultures of the Curatorial. Her current research areas focus on modes of cultural production connecting theory and practice, curatorial practice, and the effects of neo-liberalism and globalisation on the cultural field. Her publications include the seminal book Interarchive: Archival Practices and Sites in the Contemporary Art Field (2002), which was edited with Hans-Peter Feldmann, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Diethelm Stoller, and Ulf Wuggenig.