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...projects have been carried out in some and many others are in the works. The Museum of Ethnography in Geneva ("le MEG") is one of those currently in the process of redeveloping its exhibition spaces, rethinking its museography and its role in society. After serving eleven years as curator in the Division of Ethnography of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, have been appointed as curator of the departments of Africa and the Americas at the MEG, with a mission to contribute to their redevelopment. This change of institution, of country, and of tradition brings me to rethink the place of African art in an ethnographic museum and the role of ethnographic museums in general in Europe today.
In the 1990s, large ethnographic museums, often city museums or state institutions, had in many instances come to a standstill in terms of major exhibitions, whether permanent or temporary, and visitor counts dropped dangerously. This anomie may have had to do partly with the incapacity to adapt swiftly to the contemporary context of media, publishing, and marketing and the competition of television and tourism, which increasingly offered better "access" to non-Western cultures than the ethnographic museum ever had. The ensuing reactions and plans for renewed museums took very different forms, ranging from cosmetic changes to the dissolution of some museums and the creation of others. The best known and most controversial of these, the Musee du quai Branly in Paris (opened in 2006), has been discussed in these columns by Elizabeth Harney (2006). The Museum of World Cultures in Goteborg (opened in 2005) is also the result of the fusion of formerly distinct ethnographic museums, and the World Museum Liverpool offers a comparable positioning with regards to "globalization." In the latter, globalization accompanies a development of ties and exchanges with the local "communities" in exhibition making and educational programming. The African gallery, a fine sampling of the museum's collections of nineteenth and early twentieth century art, is made relevant to local identities and histories through an interplay of text panels, quotations, and installations.
The British Museum's Sainsbury African Galleries, among the largest galleries dedicated to African arts in Europe (opened in 2001), illustrates another trend: to reserve large, well-restored or newly built galleries for the exhibition of major artworks. The Pavilion des Sessions in the Louvre (opened in 2000) offers a more radical example of prestigious mise-en-scene of masterpieces. Other, seemingly different museographies for African collections in some German or Dutch ethnographic museums have something in common: While topics, scenographies, and nomenclatures may offer a varying degree of contextualization, the bottom line is always a modernist aesthetics of the mise-en-scene in the presentation of a classical selection of artifacts. The presentation more often than not represents a "culture" from a certain angle and at a specific point in history as representative of all the arts of this or that place or people. In most instances, as in the refurbished art gallery of the Tervuren museum (opened in 2005), iconic "top pieces" that were on show 50 or 100 years ago are still there under the (now carefully lux-controlled) spotlights. Only labels and glass frames are noticeably different in style. Historicization of the collection and displays is often timid, giving hints at the origins of certain pieces but rarely developing a strong historical storyline. Such museums found it opportune to set up these new permanent art galleries to depart from their public image as...
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