Symposium: Popular Imagination - Fiction With a Message (22 september 2011) Tropenmuseum
Symposium: Popular Imagination - Fiction With a Message
Following the success of the symposium Colonial Nostalgia, Tropenmuseum is hosting a second symposium on 22 September 2011 entitled Popular Imagination: Fiction with a Message based around the museum’s Africa collection. Tropenmuseum collects material witnesses to African culture. Over the last twenty years, the museum has also looked for examples of popular art and popular culture. What is the significance of this popular art and for whom is it intended? What role do and should museums play in collecting, researching and giving meaning to these objects? How do museums relate to the makers and the original target group, and to the academic world?
Various specialists will speak at the symposium and will engage in discussion with each other and the audience. Keynote speaker is Johannes Fabian, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Amsterdam University (UvA).
Book launch
During the symposium the third part of the Tropenmuseum collection series will be presented: Africa at the Tropenmuseum (Paul Faber) – published by KIT Publishers. This is the third volume of a series of ten books that discuss the collections of the Tropenmuseum and the histories and stories that accompany them. The books elucidate the often hidden backgrounds of a museum collection, discussing objects within their original context, social histories and their contemporary meaning. The emphasis lies on the history of the specific museum collection, with its different collecting and presentation practices placed in a particular time and place. Each volume is richly illustrated with objects and photographs from the Tropenmuseum collection.
Africa at the Tropenmuseum is not meant to be a general book on art from Africa, but rather a treatise on the formation and development of a specific Africa collection, which started at the beginning of the twentieth century with the fusion of the collections of the Colonial Museum in Haarlem, and the ethnographic collection of Artis, the Amsterdam Zoo. Many early objects were lost again, before Africa was formally integrated in the Tropenmuseum’s policy in 1950, when the colonial phase of the museum was concluded. The following decades saw several changing objectives, from an emphasis on development cooperation towards an orientation on art and culture. Collection policies followed, focusing on daily household objects, popular art and contemporary art and design. The result is a fragmented but vivid collection that gives access to many forms of African art and culture as well as to the mindset of European collectors, researchers, and museum workers. This richly illustrated book emphasizes this historical context and the way the objects were collected and presented to the public to this day.
Book cover, Africa at the Tropenmuseum
Programme
19.30 Welcome Jan Donner (President of the Royal Tropical Institute)
19.45 Film screening: Fang, an epic journey by Susan Vogel
20.00 Africa at the Tropenmuseum Paul Faber (Tropenmuseum Africa Curator)
20.20 Booklaunch Africa at the Tropenmuseum
20.30 INTERMISSION
21.00 Introduction Wayne Modest (Tropenmuseum Head of Museum Affairs)
20.55 Key note lecture Johannes Fabian (Emeritus Professor Cultural Anthropology at Amsterdam University – UvA)
21.20 Reaction to Johannes Fabian
Birgit Meyer (Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University) and
Bambi Ceuppens (Researcher affiliated with Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium)
21.40 Open debate with audience led by moderator
Engels Language: English
- Tropenmuseum - Amsterdam
Links
Collection development / Book Launch /
Network
Wayne Modest
Head of the Research Center of Material Culture
Paul Faber
Curator, Author
