Ethnological museums and their colonial entanglements are currently the center of heated debates. Their contested historical collecting and representation practices pose challenging questions about how their collections can be presented today beyond colonially influenced, Eurocentric foreign attributions.

This project examines such questions in depth, using the example of a hitherto unexplored collection from West Africa acquired by the well-known anthropologist Leo Frobenius in the early twentieth century. To this end, the collection will first be “unpacked” and historically processed according to “object biographies,” so that it can ultimately be analyzed from a contemporary perspective that takes into account current postcolonial discourses.

The aim is two fold: first, to make a well-founded contribution to the research of West African collections from the early twentieth century on the basis of a specific case study; and, second, to develop new strategies for dealing with ethnographic museum holdings.

Cécile Bründlmayer studied Cultural and Social Anthropology, with a focus on museum theory and fine arts, at the University of Vienna. For several years she worked as a curatorial assistant for special exhibitions, as well as for the complete reconceptualization and remounting of the World Museum Vienna’s permanent exhibition. She then took up a post as research associate and curator with a primary focus on postcolonialism at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. Since 2019 she has been a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Art History in the Department of African Art at the Free University of Berlin.