Decolonizing Ethnographic Museums: The Weltkulturen Model

Clémentine Deliss, director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt since 2010, is pioneering a post-ethnological approach to decolonize ethnographic museums by integrating contemporary artists into the museum's core operations. The museum, founded in 1904, holds about 67,000 objects and 120,000 photographs. Deliss transformed one of its three 19th-century villas into a laboratory where artists, writers, and researchers live and work with unrestricted access to the collection—the only museum in Europe offering such access. Her exhibition 'Foreign Exchange (or the stories you wouldn’t tell a stranger)' (2014-2015) explored the links between ethnology and colonial commerce, featuring anthropometric photographs by the museum's founder Dr. Bernhard Hagen, a recreated effigy of a Papuan warrior, and works by artists like Peggy Buth and Luke Willis Thompson. Deliss also invited Senegalese artist El Hadji Sy for a residency and exhibition (2015) that combined his works with ethnographic objects. The museum has collected over 3,000 pieces of contemporary African art since 1974. Deliss argues that post-modern critiques of scientific objectivity have opened space for artistic subjectivity, citing Michel Leiris's dictum that extreme subjectivity reaches objectivity. She plans to create a 'university museum' for interdisciplinary research, reviving the collaborative spirit of the surrealist journal 'Documents' (1929-1930) and the Italian Renaissance.