Ethics and Possibilities of Representation - 30 October 2020
CONTENT TRIGGER WARNING: This talk deals with the sensitive issue of human remains in museum collections. It specifically deals with a human skull in the Humboldt Museum collections. It's provenance is still unknown, and the subject of continued scientific and artistic investigation.
In this first Spirals series session we approached the challenging but rich matter of “Archival Ethics and Possibilities of Representation”. Gathered under the auspices of various colonial projects, or collected for unethical scientific projects, natural specimens, objects and human remains held in heritage institutions, hospitals and universities in Europe present an extraordinary set of scholarly and ethical problems of management, return, and restitution. (See Tal Adler, Linda Fibiger, John Harries et. al. “Dead Images: Facing the history, ethics and politics of European skull collections,” (2021), and “Reflexive Photography and the Transformation of Shock,” based on a Skype interview held in 2018). Inscribed by self-evident traces of ownership and origin, and subject to claims for return, these assemblages are often also marked by broken official provenance, incorporation and classification, that trouble easy modes of addressing them, deaccession and return.
This session addressed questions on: How can we approach some of the urgent questions posed by contentious collections? How do we address the violence of museological incorporation and display of human remains as anatomical specimens specifically? What artistic strategies can we mobilise to reformulate some of the challenging ethical questions that objects such as these provoke in museum and heritage settings? And what types of language, terms and concepts can we summon up as modes of ethically addressing these difficult collections and recover different ways of understanding their status as sensitive objects of knowledge?
Further reading:
Adler, T., Fibiger, L., Harries, J., Smith, J. & Szöke, A. (2018). Exposure: the ethics of making, sharing and displaying photographs of human remains. Human Remains and Violence, 4(1). 3-24.
Hannouch, H. (ed.). (2020). Human Remains and the Limits of Artistic Re-Appropriation in Photography and Film. Cinergie, 17. 123-131.
Milevska, S. (ed.). (2019). Contentious Objects/Ashamed Subjects. TRACES Exhibition Catalogue. Galleria del Progetto, Milan. 18 January - 6 February 2019.
Speaker Bio: Tal Adler is a conceptual artist based at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
For over two decades, Tal Adler has been developing methods of collaborative artistic research for engaging with difficult pasts, contentious collections and conflicted communities in Israel/Palestine and in Europe. In his research project, “Who is ID 8470?,” Tal endevoured to develop ways of rethinking the undocumented provenance of a skull held in the collection of the Institution Charité, Universitätsmedizin Berlin. His presentation for the session, titled, “Contentious Collections and Curatorial Discord,” outlined approaches developed for his work on the project "Dead Images," (2016) (video series can be accessed here) - a project that looked at the ethics of showing or not showing human remains in the Natural History Museum in Vienna in the context of TRACES research project, Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts: From Intervention to Co-Production, (2015) (see Adler’s recent article on sustainable change for heritage institutions, “The Creative Co-Production,” 2021).
Discussant Bio: Dr George Mahashe is an Artist and Lecturer at Michaelis School of Fine Art.
On the 30th of October, the CCA held the first of its new Spirals virtual seminar series talks between the Centre for Curating the Archive (CCA) and the Centre for Anthropological Research on Heritage and Museums (CARMAH) in Berlin.
Formulated by the CCA's newly appointed Junior Research Fellow, Dr Duane Jethro, the series is meant to draw artists, scholars, curators and practitioners in Berlin into a discussion with researchers and graduate students at the CCA about the nature of archive and the curatorial in our contemporary world.
The first session, Archival Ethics and Possibilities of Representation, featured as its presenter Tal Adler, an artist and researcher at CARMAH. Adler started his presentation with the following statement (courtesy of the ever-amusing Zoom transcript):
00:08:29
Okay. So I'll start actually
00:08:31
With a conflict or disagreement, it's always very attractive to start like this and I'll share my screen.
The conflict or disagreement in question concerned a skull situated in the anatomical collection of the Humboldt University, Berlin. This skull (known as ID 8470) had recently been selected by a team of curators to feature in an exhibition of ‘highlight objects’ drawn from the various university collections – an inclusion which resulted in an internal disagreement amongst the curatorial team about the ethics of putting it on display in the future. No stranger to display, this skull had in fact already featured in a range of exhibitions spanning the last 20 years. Its role in all of these were however, as a representative of the 19th century practice of phrenology (because of the markings made on its surface) with little attention paid to ethical concerns about the display of human remains. For Adler, who was brought in as an external advisor to the curatorial team, the internal disagreement between the curators revealed the extent to which this singular framing of the skull as an anatomical scientific object overshadowed any questions regarding the identity of the individual to whom it belonged. His resulting project, Who is ID 8470?, therefore set out to address this omitted (and absent) provenance through the creation of a series of historical and imagined identities which he manifested as a series of projections (drawing on a popular 19th century illusion technique called Pepper’s Ghost), in the exhibition space.
These later points made for rich discussion between the artists and the audience, leading to generative ways of rethinking singular modes of addressing the presences that wander in museum spaces (ghosts, hauntings, specters), culturally diverse ways of addressing the dead and their varied and various implications for art practise and scholarship engaging museums, human remains and the dead. These are precisely the points of productive difference in perspective the series hopes to spin out going forward.
Adler and Mahashe’s session provided a stimulating foundation for a series which promises to throw ideas of art, archive and the curatorial into flux and, in the words of Dr Jethro, one that invokes the spiral “to summon up a generative set of exchanges”. The next session, Nature(s), Archive and Anthropology, is scheduled for the 27th of November, and will feature as presenter, Tahani Nadim, Professor at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, and the artist-curator, Fritha Langerman, as the discussant.
Watch a recording of the discussion between Tal, George and the various researchers of the CCA, the APC and CARMAH here.