Decentring the Museum

Contemporary Art Institutions and Colonial Legacies

By: Nina Moentmann

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Hardcover | 17 November 2023

At a Glance

Hardcover
144 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
13.7 x 20.8 x 1.7

Hardcover

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Nina Montmanns 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.

Industry Reviews

In this lucid book Nina Montmann 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. Montmann 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 Montmann 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

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