Coming to Terms with the Stasi: History and Memory in the Bautzen Memorial

This paper examines the role played by the encounter of history and personal memories in the difficult process of coming to terms with the Stasi in present-day eastern Germany. While historians have made substantial progress over the last two decades in accounting for the wide range of ways in which the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is remembered by East Germans, the memorials and museums of the reunified Germany remain unable to integrate memories of dictatorial oppression and happiness in everyday life. Sites commemorating state repression are thus often assumed to lack impact on former GDR citizens whose memories differ from official versions of history. These assumptions are tested for the Bautzen Memorial, formerly known as the ‘celebrities’ prison' of the East German Ministry of State Security. Focusing on the differing receptions of GDR memorial sites, this article draws on interviews with two former political prisoners and with visitors to the Memorial who grew up in socialist East Germany. It argues that the open approach of the Memorial, which leaves visitors to draw their own conclusions from the exhibition, allows different stakeholders to find ways of personal engagement with the past at the site despite the disparities with their own memories.     

时代、文化资本与支配权:对张謇创办南通博物苑的再思考

面对19世纪末中国空前的民族危机和剧遽社会变迁,张謇选择了"实业救国"、"教育救国"的道路。南通博物苑作为张謇教育事业的重要组成部分,是其教育救国思想的具体体现。张謇在南通博物苑创办过程中实现了资本的文化化和文化的资本化双重过程:一方面,将经济资本转化为文化资本;另一方面,又将文化资本转化为其象征资本的一部分,使其获得更大社会权力,从而能够按照自己的政治理想对地方社会进行塑造。张謇对于作为文化资本的南通博物苑的支配主要体现在三个方面:藏品内容及知识系统的构建、博物馆教育作用的树立及对参观者的规范。张謇对文化资本的支配表面上是其个人意志的体现,由其政治理念所驱动;而深究,终不免受时代和机构属性等因素的制约与影响。     

Sense and sensitivity: Appraising the Titanic

Abstract

The first substantial exhibition of material retrieved from the wreck of the Titanic was mounted by the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, in October 1994. Extended for a second six‐month run the following April, this was to be the most popular exhibition the museum had ever staged, helping to attract some 720,000 people through the turnstiles during the year. It also generated an unprecedented level of media attention, particularly in the period leading up to the opening, placing a wide ranging (but ultimately soft) focus on the museum's motivation for proceeding into the deep waters of apparently delicate subject matter. Indeed, the controversy of the exhibition —a phenomenon partly created, developed and sustained by the media itself — not only formed a backdrop to the planning, design and installation of the show; to some extent the displays, their effects and their meanings became dependent on the context of argument and rhetoric in which they were generated. In the curators’ attempts to reconcile appropriately the often‐competing demands of the museum market of professional ethics, economics, and contemporary standards of taste and morality, it may be asked whether the National Maritime Museum was passenger or pilot in the stormy waters it encountered through this project. Moreover, what was the true nature and consequence of the unrest: a minor local difficulty or a museological issue of some significance? This article is an attempt, despite the probable partisanship of its author, to explore with some of the objectivity of hindsight these questions and the circumstances in which they arose. ¹     

Museums and communities in Africa: facing the new challenges

Abstract

Established during the colonial era, the majority of museums in Africa were modeled on their European counterparts. The period of Africanization that followed the independence of many African nations witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of Africans receiving higher education and specialized training. Institutions such as museums began to come under the leadership of indigenous Africans but, in most cases, the exhibits and their condition(s) remained the same. Today, African museums face new challenges: how can they become more relevant, both to the local communities they serve and to foreign visitors? How can they attract more visitors, especially from local communities? This article discusses the notion of ‘indigenous’ in an African context. It looks at the development of museums in Africa and their current metamorphosis into dynamic cultural centres that address pertinent social, cultural and even economic issues-in the face of dwindling government funding and increased modernization and globalization. It discusses several museums and how they are meeting these challenges, and how organizations such as AFRICOM (International Council of African Museums) and programmes such as SAMP (African–Swedish Museum Network) are contributing to the positive changes currently taking place.     

‘My voice counts because I’m handsome.’ Democratising the museum: the power of museum participation

Abstract

Participation – where visitors are invited to leave a comment, co-create, or contribute to exhibitions – has been hailed as an opportunity to democratise the museum experience. New qualitative data from on-site and follow up interviews with museum visitors and practitioners at the experimental exhibition Power of 1 at the Museum of Australian Democracy has been used as a case study to determine if the rhetoric of the highly interactive, audience-centred approach of the participatory museum is meeting its aims. This paper argues that participation has the potential to democratise the museum experience for visitors, particularly when a more expansive definition is applied which acknowledges the benefits of participation beyond simply leaving a comment. Participation can provoke conversations and forge connections with real and imagined communities within the museum and beyond; however this potential is hampered by the often unacknowledged undemocratic practices within institutions by professionals who devalue visitor participation and power-sharing in order to uphold traditional museum practices.     

博物馆展示中的观众注意力引导——以“南越王墓出土文物陈列”为例

注意是人类进行信息加工的前提条件。博物馆观众的注意具有明显的选择性,大多数观众的参观是无意注意行为,博物馆应根据此特性进行管理,从展前的信息组织开始,合理规划展览的内容和形式;在展览预展期,应结合驻足人数、驻足时间以及参观效果访谈等因素进行观众注意力评量,并根据结果实时调整展览设计;开展后,应综合利用各种资源和手段,完善观众注意力引导,从而加强博物馆与观众之间的信息沟通与交流,实现博物馆的教育和传播功能。     

‘A Cunning Skill Did Lurk’: Susanna Perwich and the Mysteries of a Seventeenth-Century Needlework Cabinet

A seventeenth-century embroidered cabinet belonging to the Los Angeles Museum of Art includes a rare detail — a coat of arms. This essay explores the likelihood that the maker of this cabinet, as established by its coat of arms, was a member of the Perwich family, who ran a girls’ school in Civil War-era London, and the possibility that the cabinet was made by Susanna Perwich, a musical prodigy and subject of a 1661 biography published shortly after her untimely death. This essay discusses connections between Perwich’s life and the cabinet’s needleworked illustrations, revealing that the cabinet illustrates the Book of Ruth. Cabinets and caskets with their many compartments can be seen as metaphors for the compartmentalisation of the lives of late seventeenth-century Englishwomen who were excluded from many male-dominated physical and intellectual spaces in the aftermath of the English Civil War but who, nonetheless, created and meaningfully embellished personal objects in their own spaces.     

中国博物馆大型原创性特展之展览策划——以南京博物院为例专访龚良院长

21世纪以来,中国博物馆的大型原创性特展工作呈现良好的发展态势。南京博物院龚良院长指出,大型原创性特展作为博物馆为公众提供更好的文化服务的文化产品,既能衡量博物馆的发展活力,也有利于博物馆的可持续发展。博物馆应根据自身的定位和特色完善藏品体系,从而确定展览主题,制订展览规划。高校应该围绕研究公众、服务公众调整博物馆学的课程设置。试行中的理事会制度将有助于推动博物馆为公众提供高品质的文化服务、满足公众更高的精神文化需求。南京博物院近年大力推行策展人制度,鼓励策划大型原创性特展,重视并强调展示文物之间的相互关系。2016年度举办的"法老·王"展是一次用低票价、非营利的方法,举办了一个不用财政资金、为公众提供优质服务的高品质展览,并将展览作为文化创意产品的有益尝试,将为中国博物馆界提供一个可复制的成功案例。     

The ethics of displaying human remains from British archaeological sites

Abstract

The 1998 exhibition London Bodies at the Museum of London provided an opportunity to review the ethical issues relating to the excavation, study and display of human remains in modern Britain. It is suggested that for most Britons the display of human skeletal material is not considered a problem, but that archaeologists would do well to ensure that their practices are in line with the views and beliefs of the society in which they work.     

Touching history and making community. The memory of the 1980 Turkish military coup in the 12 September Museum of Shame

ABSTRACT

This contribution draws on ethnography conducted in Istanbul to analyse the Museum of Shame, an amateur exhibition dedicated to the memory of leftist militants who were victims of state violence following the 1980–1983 military coup in Turkey. This museification is the work of a group of ex-revolutionaries and can be considered a cultural practice that challenges statist historiography and creates a mnemonic community. By exhibiting the possessions of murdered militants, it inscribes their personal experiences into collective frames and fosters intergenerational transmission. Its temporality reflects the ethos of the revolutionary fighter, turning mourning into a political statement. However, though this museum practice allows the community to become an agent of history, it is unable to encompass the varying experiences of ex-militants. Its aestheticization of violence and its moral injunctions limit the extent of social solidarity and advance essentialisms that contribute to the construction of marginality from the inside.     

视觉文化背景下博物馆展示价值定位——自然博物馆陈列的新体悟

博物馆展示艺术是一种诉诸视觉器官的文化形态。为观众提供可欣赏、受教育的展示精品,是博物馆追求的永恒主题。本文通过对博物馆展示主题、创意设计、科技维新及视觉艺术四方面进行思考,发掘博物馆自身所蕴藏的艺术价值和文化价值是当代视觉文化背景下展示艺术的价值定位。     

‘Hidden from view’?: an analysis of the integration of women’s history and women’s voices into Australia’s social history exhibitions

ABSTRACT

‘Women have mostly been left out of history’, boldly asserted Elizabeth Willis in her exhibition text for The Story of Victoria in 1985. Taking Willis’ statement as a starting point, this article aims to trace firstly how women have been rewritten into Australia’s social history exhibitions focusing on the use of voice as a strategy to do so, and secondly how these voices have changed historical master narratives – by allowing a shift from a big picture history to intimate and deeply personal stories that recast our understanding of the past in ways that are inclusive of gendered experiences. We investigate the use of the curatorial voice as reflected in Willis’ work, aligning it with the notion of curatorial activism, before exploring the changing curatorial practices that expanded the potential for an interpretive approach that incorporated the voice of the subjects themselves as a central component in the telling of history. We then analyse the impact of these strategies on traditional understandings of the past through three exhibitions developed by Melbourne Museum over 30 years: The Story of Victoria, a successor exhibition The Melbourne Story, and their Great War centenary exhibition, WWI: Love & Sorrow.     

The Dispersed Sculpture of Parthenay and the Contributions of Nuclear Science

Abstract

TWENTY-TWO limestone sculptures, thought to have once decorated the now-destroyed 12th-century church Notre-Dame-de-la-Couldre in Parthenay (Deux-Sèvres), are dispersed in numerous American and French museum collections. To assess their provenance, stylistic analysis and documentary evidence are here combined with compositional analysis of their stone by neutron activation. Comparison of the resulting compositional profiles with those of samples from the still-standing west façade produced matches for works in the Musée du Louvre, Glencairn Museum, William Hayes Fogg Museum, and a private collection. Samples from sculptures in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art differ in composition from each other and from those that match stone from the façade of Notre-Dame-de-la-Couldre. Still other works, such as those in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, returned varied results conflicting with other provenance information. This application of scientific techniques sheds new light on these sculptures, but just as importantly, this diverse group — by offering a range of archival, photographic, and restoration records — provides an excellent demonstration of the contributions, as well as limitations, of nuclear science to provenance study.     

Science and Technology for Tommorrow's World Health

Abstract

This essay reviews an exhibition in the National Technical Museum, Prague, from 30 September to 23 October 1994 to mark the visit of Queen Margarethe II of Denmark to the Czech Republic on 11–13 October 1994     

Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum

Museums are conventionally viewed as institutions dedicated to the conservation of valued objects and the education of the public. Recently, controversies have arisen regarding the representation of history in museums. National museums in America and Germany considered here, such as the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the German Historical Museum, have become sites of contention where national histories and personal memories are often at odds. Contemporary art installations in museums which take historical consciousness as their theme similarly raise contentious issues about public knowledge of and personal interest in the past. When members of publics find that their memories of the past or their expectations for museum experiences are not being met, a kind of "distortion" occurs. The "distortion" related to memory and history in the museum is not so much of facts or interpretations, but rather a distortion from the lack of congruity between personal experience and expectation, on the one hand, and the institutional representation of the past on the other. This essay explores the possibilities for a redefined relationship between personal memory and history that is experienced in contemporary museums.     

Captain Cook upon Changing Seas: Indigenous Voices and Reimagining at the British Museum

ABSTRACT

This article reviews the British Museum exhibition, Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives, 29 November 2018–4 August 2019. It situates the exhibition within a global context of exhibitions held around the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first voyage, and critically considers its attempt to reframe dominant narratives surrounding Cook, his voyages and more broadly the colonization of the Pacific through a focus on Pacific Islander perspectives within a changing museum sector.     

Arena symposium: equal opportunities

The Internet is a hospitable medium for distance learning. Some geography educators fear that distance education confronts the discipline with a moral dilemma, however. One, in particular, acknowledges some of the advantages of distance learning, but contends that it cannot convey the sense of place that is 'the essence of what it means to be a geographer'. This paper is concerned with the morality of distance learning. In particular, it considers educators' obligations to deliver quality education, and to make it as widely accessible as possible. The paper stresses that the key distinction between distance learning and traditional resident instruction is not the mode of delivery, nor is it the distances in time and space that separate students and teachers. Rather, it is that distance learners are a qualitatively different, older population, with different educational needs from traditional on-campus undergraduates and graduate students. The paper argues that geography educators have a moral obligation to serve lifelong learners, an obligation that should take precedence over our allegiance to conventional notions about what constitutes the essence of our field.     

Alternative Radio: exhibiting radio and music heritage after the Christchurch earthquakes

This article examines the representation of Christchurch, New Zealand, student radio station RDU in the exhibition Alternative Radio at the Canterbury Museum in 2016. With the intention of ‘making visible what is invisible’ about radio broadcasting, the exhibition articulated RDU as a point of interconnection between the technical elements of broadcasting, the social and musical culture of station staff and volunteers, and the broader local and national music scenes. This paper is grounded in observations of the exhibitions and associated public programmes, and interviews with the key participants in the exhibition including the museum’s exhibition manager and staff from RDU, who acted as independent practitioners in collaboration with the museum. Alternative Radio also addressed the aftermath of the major earthquake of 22 February 2011, when RDU moved into a customised horse truck after losing its broadcast studio. The exhibition came about because of the cultural resonance of the post-quake story, but also emphasised the long history of the station before that event, and located this small student radio station in the broader heritage discourse of the Canterbury museum, activating the historical, cultural, and personal memories of the station’s participants and audiences.     

弦轮密运 清宫钟表

2009年12月25日,沈阳故宫博物院和广州博物馆在广州越秀山镇海楼联合举办弦轮密运——沈阳故宫博物院院藏清宫钟表展,共展出沈阳故宫博物院、广州博物馆藏清宫钟表30余座。这些机械钟表多于18-19世纪时,通过广州粤海关采购和广州钟表工匠制作,以贡品形式入贡清宫的产品,其中部分作品还出自声名显赫的钟表大师之手。     

Sense and Sensibility in Midwestern Archaeology and the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology,Part II

Abstract

The progression of archaeology in the midcontinent over the past 40 years has moved on a series of different but overlapping fronts: regional, governmental, institutional, disciplinary, and personal. This collection of thoughts by both longtime and relatively young practitioners of our field suggests the many ways that archaeology has changed for the good—and maybe not so good—depending on our own experiences. Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology (MCJA) has changed along with these developments. Part I of this discussion centered on the need for, and foundation of, MCJA. Part II is more diverse, with the archaeologists who have participated in the field for the last 40 years reflecting on the shifts in archaeology within their regions—both in terms of practice and institutional practices. The forces of national economics and academic politics and the changing sensibilities toward our public constituencies described here are themes that continue to influence us today.