Te Papa to Berlin

Te Papa to Berlin
Author: Ken Gorbey
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Museum directors
ISBN: 9781988592374

Ken Gorbey is a remarkable man who for 15 years was involved with developing and realising the revolutionary cultural concept that became Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand. Then in 1999 he was headhunted by W. Michael Blumenthal to salvage the Jewish Museum Berlin, which was failing and fast becoming a national embarrassment. Led by Gorbey, a young, inexperienced staff, facing impossible deadlines, rose to the challenge and the museum, housed in Daniel Libeskind's lightning-bolt design, opened to acclaim. As Blumenthal writes in the foreword: 'I can no longer remember what possessed me to seriously consider actually reaching out to this fabled Kiwi as a possible answer to my increasingly serious dilemma ...' but the notion paid off and today the JMB is one of Germany's premier cultural institutions. Te Papa to Berlin is a great story--a lively insider perspective about cultural identity and nation building, about how museums can act as healing social instruments by reconciling dark and difficult histories, and about major shifts in museum thinking and practice over time. It is also about the difference that can be made by a visionary and highly effective leader and team builder.

Te Papa

Te Papa
Author: Conal McCarthy
Publisher: Te Papa Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2018-01-07
Genre: Art
ISBN: 099510316X

Published to mark 20 years since the landmark opening of Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand in 1998, this illustrated book by well-known museum studies academic Conal McCarthy examines the vision behind the museum, how it has evolved in the last two decades, and the particular way Te Papa goes about the business of being a national museum in a nation with two treaty partners. McCarthy provides a warm and at times critical appraisal of its origins, development, innovations, and reception, including some of its key museological features which have drawn international attention, highlights of exhibitions, collections and programs over its first twenty years, and the issues that have sparked national and local debate.

Refocusing Ethnographic Museums through Oceanic Lenses

Refocusing Ethnographic Museums through Oceanic Lenses
Author: Philipp Schorch
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2020-04-30
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0824881176

Refocusing Ethnographic Museums through Oceanic Lenses offers a collaborative ethnographic investigation of Indigenous museum practices in three Pacific museums located at the corners of the so-called Polynesian triangle: Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Hawai‘i; Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; and Museo Antropológico Padre Sebastián Englert, Rapa Nui. Since their inception, ethnographic museums have influenced academic and public imaginations of other cultural-geographic regions, and the often resulting Euro-Americentric projection of anthropological imaginations has come under intense pressure, as seen in recent debates and conflicts around the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, Germany. At the same time, (post)colonial renegotiations in former European and American colonies have initiated dramatic changes to anthropological approaches through Indigenous museum practices. This book shapes a dialogue between Euro-Americentric myopia and Oceanic perspectives by offering historically informed, ethnographic insights into Indigenous museum practices grounded in Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies. In doing so, it employs Oceanic lenses that help to reframe Pacific collections in, and the production of public understandings through, ethnographic museums in Europe and the Americas. By offering insights into Indigenous museologies across Oceania, the coauthors seek to recalibrate ethnographic museums, collections, and practices through Indigenous Oceanic approaches and perspectives. This, in turn, should assist any museum scholar and professional in rethinking and redoing their respective institutional settings, intellectual frameworks, and museum processes when dealing with Oceanic affairs; and, more broadly, in doing the “epistemic work” needed to confront “coloniality,” not only as a political problem or ethical obligation, but “as an epistemology, as a politics of knowledge.” A noteworthy feature is the book’s layered coauthorship and multi-vocality, drawing on a collaborative approach that has put the (widespread) philosophical commitment to dialogical inquiry into (seldom) practice by systematically co-constituting ethnographic knowledge. Further, the book shapes an “ethnographic kaleidoscope,” proposing the metaphor of the kaleidoscope as a way of encouraging fluid ethnographic engagements to avoid the impulse to solidify and enclose differences, and remain open to changing ethnographic meanings, positions, performances, and relationships. The coauthors collaboratively mobilize Oceanic eyes, bodies, and sovereignties, thus enacting an ethnographic kaleidoscopic process and effect aimed at refocusing ethnographic museums through Oceanic lenses.

Visiting the Visitor

Visiting the Visitor
Author: Ann Davis
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2016-07-31
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3839432898

The study of the museum visitor has undergone radical transformation. Each author here has asked unfamiliar questions and responded with fresh answers. Some of these questions involve the visitor's identity, what she brings to her museum experience. Can we gain entry into this experience? Does more technology really increase access to the objects themselves? Others probe the very nature of museum going and exhibition making, demanding that we reexamine the traditional exhibition to reposition the visitor and her meaning-making at the centre. The volume provokes imaginative research and encourages new conclusions.

The Museum of the Future

The Museum of the Future
Author: Karl Borromäus Murr
Publisher: V&R Unipress
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2024-09-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3847017055

Peter Sloterdijk sees our digitalized world in a "growing spatial crisis", accompanied by the danger of a "general virtuality of all relationships". Others view the digitalization of the world as opening up a grassroots democratic space that allows everyone access to culture. Against this backdrop, this anthology examines the spatial characteristics of the museum – between physical place and virtual space. The chapters collected here approach the museum space from various disciplinary perspectives, such as philosophy, history, art history, architecture, scenography, museum education and curatorial studies. At the same time, the contributions by international museum experts are assigned to different literary genres – fundamental considerations alternate with think pieces, case studies and interviews.

Memorials in Berlin and Buenos Aires

Memorials in Berlin and Buenos Aires
Author: Brigitte Sion
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2014-12-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0739176315

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Berlin, inaugurated in 2005, and the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism within the Memory Park (Parque de la Memoria) in Buenos Aires, partially unveiled in 2007, have been controversial from start to finish. While these sites differ in many respects, Germany and Argentina share a history of dictatorial regimes that murdered civilians on a massive scale. The Nazis implemented the genocide of millions of Jews and other minorities during World War II. In Argentina, the junta-led state repression was responsible for the “disappearance” and subsequent murder of thousands of civilians between 1976 and 1983. Decades later, new governments in Germany and Argentina acknowledged the responsibility of their respective states for these mass murders by memorializing the victims with a national monument in the capital city for the first time. This study of two memorials develops a model and method for analyzing the memorialization of recent tragedies that share several basic characteristics: the state creates a self-indicting national memorial to the victims of state-sponsored mass murder in the absence of their bodies. Analyzed as sites of conflicting performances and as performances themselves, these memorials illuminate the ways in which people engage with them, and how an architecture of absence triggers embodied memory through somatic experience. While death tourism and architourism are a key to their success in attracting visitors, they also pose a threat to their commemorative role. Besides assessing the success and failure of these memorials, Sion explores the ways in which these sites are paradigmatic and offers a model for analyzing a transnational circuit of commemorative practices.

A Companion to Museum Studies

A Companion to Museum Studies
Author: Sharon Macdonald
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 598
Release: 2011-08-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1444357948

A Companion to Museum Studies captures the multidisciplinary approach to the study of the development, roles, and significance of museums in contemporary society. Collects first-rate original essays by leading figures from a range of disciplines and theoretical stances, including anthropology, art history, history, literature, sociology, cultural studies, and museum studies Examines the complexity of the museum from cultural, political, curatorial, historical and representational perspectives Covers traditional subjects, such as space, display, buildings, objects and collecting, and more contemporary challenges such as visiting, commerce, community and experimental exhibition forms

Interrogating Race and Racism

Interrogating Race and Racism
Author: Vijay Agnew
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0802093566

Agnew delves into the public and private spheres of several distinct communities in order to expose the underlying inequalities within Canada's economic, social, legal, and political systems that frequently result in the denial of basic rights to migrant women.

Contested Holdings

Contested Holdings
Author: Felicity Bodenstein
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2022-02-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1800734247

Going beyond strictly legal and property-oriented aspects of the restitution debate, restitution is considered as part of a larger set of processes of return that affect museums and collections, as well as notions of heritage and object status. Covering a range of case studies and a global geography, the authors aim to historicize and bring depth to contemporary debates in relation to both the return of material culture and human remains. Defined as contested holdings, differing museum collections ranging from fine arts to physical anthropology provide connections between the treatment and conceptualization of collections that generally occupy separate realms in the museum world.

Bridging the Divide

Bridging the Divide
Author: World Archaeological Congress (Organization). Indigenous Inter-Congress
Publisher: Left Coast Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2010-09-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1598743929

The collected essays in this volume address contemporary issues regarding the relationship between Indigenous groups and archaeologists, including the challenges of dialogue, colonialism, the difficulties of working within legislative and institutional frameworks, and NAGPRA and similar legislation. The disciplines of archaeology and cultural heritage management are international in scope and many countries continue to experience the impact of colonialism. In response to these common experiences, both archaeology and indigenous political movements involve international networks through which information quickly moves around the globe. This volume reflects these dynamic dialectics between the past and the present and between the international and the local, demonstrating that archaeology is a historical science always linked to contemporary cultural concerns.