TALKING OBJECTS

The TALKING OBJECTS LAB is an artistic research project dedicated to the decolonization of memory and knowledge. Since 2021, it has been evolving in workshops, think tanks, artist residencies, artistic interventions, and exhibitions in Germany, Senegal, Kenya, Nigeria, and on the internet. The goals of the LAB are to break through colonial thought patterns, question Eurocentric perspectives, practice epistemic disobedience, and promote decolonial curatorial and artistic practices.

Essential to this is the reconsideration of objects as vehicles of history and mediators of knowledge as well as the contemplation of how we as viewers (can) enter into a relationship with them. The LAB pursues a poly-perspective approach that breaks with knowledge hierarchies and understands memory and remembrance as dynamic processes that develop out of the present. Thus, it distances itself from positivist ideas and emphasizes that we are always moving through networks of diverse meanings and possible interpretations. What consequences does this have for curatorial practice and forms of preservation and presentation in the museum?

Alongside the Grassi Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig, the Museum Europäischer Kulturen in Berlin, the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne and the Musée Théodore Monod d’Art africain in Dakar, Senegal, the Museum Angewandte Kunst is one of the partner institutions of the TALKING OBJECTS project. A selection of objects from the collections of these institutions will become part of the digital TALKING OBJECTS ARCHIVE, an archive for decolonial knowledge production. This constantly growing album presents the objects included from the collection of the Museum Angewandte Kunst.