Research Area

Sensitive collections in museums and universities – inventories that originated in colonial or other violent contexts – document the entanglement of scientific and artistic practices in the 19th and 20th centuries with colonial structures and National Socialist ideology. The dissertation “The Dead Teach the Living. Sensitive collections in the interplay of art, technology, and the public sphere” focuses on the analysis of artistic engagements with the National Socialist and colonial provenances of historically contested collections, which have only been critically examined in German-speaking countries since the 1980s and the early 21st century. One of the central case studies examines the work of Christine Borland, particularly her engagement with (palaeo-)anthropological face casts and facial reconstructions for the Skulptur Projekte Münster 1997, which were part of the anatomical teaching collection of the University of Münster. The project seeks to explore the broader contexts of Borland’s work: on the one hand, it reconstructs the provenances and contexts of the artefacts; on the other, it situates her practice in dialogue with other works of art, within the framework of digital technologies, contactless reproduction methods, and postcolonial theories, as well as approaches to memory culture.