Niklas Wolf | Conflict and Cooperation

Talk Niklas Wolf KNIR Vodun’s Visuals

23Apr By Niklas Wolf

In February 2024 Niklas Wolf participated in the international workshop „Missionary Material Assemblages and the Mission of Museums: The Spirit on Display“ held at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR).

The workshop was organised by Ana Rita Amaral, being part of the „Religious Matters in an Entangled World“-Project at Utrecht University (Birgit Meyer et al.) and focused „(…) on the past and present entanglements between Christian evangelisation and the manifold practices associated with making collections and arranging them in museums and exhibitions“, including visits to the Vatican’s Missionary-Ethnological Museum, now called the Ethnological Museum Anima Mundi as well as the Museo della Civiltà “Luigi Pigorini”.

Giving a talk on “The Museum as Shrine. The Shrine as Museum?” „Niklas Wolf (University of Zürich) spoke about his research on ‘Vodun’s Visuals’, focusing on terminology and display, within a series of shrines and museums in Ghana and Germany. Niklas elaborated on the spatial settings, often shrines with rich ‘pictorial programs’ on the walls, where Vodun can live in ‘tangible form’ and ‘where they are treated, fed and interacted with’, practices that approximate such spaces to museums. The latter, in turn, can sometimes accommodate the reinstallation and display of shrines and altars, raising questions about spiritual efficacy, aesthetic contemplation, and the nature of the practices that take place both in shrines and museums.“

see: https://religiousmatters.nl/missionary-material-assemblages-and-the-mission-of-museums-the-spirit-on-display-workshop-report-by-ana-rita-amaral/; photo: Deborah Dainese)

Talk Spiritual Ways and Workings Niklas Wolf

09Apr By Niklas Wolf

Terms like “fetish”, “fetishism”, “fetish priest” have been used by scholars and researchers in the past to misleadingly alienate and demonise performative practices of Vodun and their use of tangible manifestations. Often following religious and political agendas of colonialism, they couldn’t be further from any truth related to Vodun’s understanding of visual epistemologies and practices as well as their imagery.

As part of the exhibition “Im Rausch(en) der Dinge. Fetisch in der Kunst” (“Intoxicating Objects. Fetishism in Art”) held at Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich, Niklas Wolf will present on Spiritual Ways and Workings. Zu performativen Praktiken und materiellen Manifestationen westafrikanischer Vodun (“Spiritual Ways and Workings. On the Performative Practices and Material Manifestations of West African Vodun”).

Where: Institute for Art History, Zurich University

When: Tuesday, 30th April, 6.30 – 7.30 pm

more information: https://gs.ethz.ch/en/current/

publication ZADOKELI. EFO SELA x MAWULI ADZEI x ELIKPLIM AKORLI Sela Adjei Niklas Wolf

04Aug By Niklas Wolf

New publication ZADOKELI. EFO SELA x MAWULI ADZEI x ELIKPLIM AKORLI (ed. by G. Edzordzi Agbozo and Niklas Wolf) available open access https://zenodo.org/record/7998232 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7998232)

The word “zadokeli” in Ewe, means “eclipse of the sun”. During the global pandemic in 2020, 6 eclipses occurred within the year including 4 lunar eclipses across the world, with one total and one annular solar eclipse in addition. The first eclipse of 2020 occurred between 10th and 11th January, foreshadowing a dark year ahead. In the Ewe worldview, an eclipse, whether solar or lunar, is of deep spiritual significance. Thus, in the event of an eclipse, traditional priests, priestesses and diviners seek answers and offer prayers. These holders of esoteric knowledge engage with the divinities to ‘restore’ normal cosmic order through propitiation rites. Adjei’s role here is as an artist drawing links between the 2020 eclipse and the rise in anti-Black violence and injustice, and positions him among the far-seeing priests and diviners who seek answers in an effort to ‘restore’ both cosmic and social order. Thus, through his new collection of paintings, Sela Adjei visually expands the discussion of analogizing the Black predicament with a recurring image of a gloomy eclipse; Zadokeli is the same theme that animates Mawuli Adzei’s new poetry anthology bearing the same title. The book was edited by G. Edzordzi Agbozo, Ph.D. (University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA) and Niklas Wolf, M.A. (University of Zurich). The contributing scholars include: Asana Greenstreet, M.A. (Royal College of Art), Matthew Francis Rarey, Ph.D. (Oberlin, Ohio, USA), Elikplim Akorli, M.Phil, Damawa L. Jallah, Alan Dunyo Avorgbedor, Ph.D. (McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture), kwabena agyare yeboah (University of California, Santa Barbara), Kate Wand, MFA, Nii Kotei Nikoi, Ph.D. (College of Wooster, Ohio, U.S.A.), and Fidelia Ankomah, M.Phil (University of Cape Coast, Ghana).

publication Acquisition and Display Ethics Zainabu Jallo

25MayMay 25, 2023 By Niklas Wolf

As outcome of her research project “Material Expressions of West African Spirituality in the Americas: Transatlantic Continuities in Haiti” Zainabu Jallo’s conversation with Holger Jebens (Frobenius Institute, Goethe University Frankfurt) on “Acquisition and Display Ethics”, dealing with object transfers, methods of ethical investigation, and display, was published in PAIDEUMA Zeitschrift für kulturanthropologische Forschung 68, Reimer: Frankfurt am Main 2022.

publication Material Culture in Transit Zainabu Jallo Niklas Wolf

15MayMay 16, 2023 By Niklas Wolf

Material Culture in Transit: Theory and Practice (Routledge 2023) – new Publication out now (DOI: 10.4324/9781003282334)

The book was edited by Zainabu Jallo, featuring a contribution by Niklas Wolf.

The study of artefacts, objects, and things – or in whichever term the material world is described – is not only restricted to their physical attributes but engages in an interplay between people and things. (…) This stresses that Onthology, unlike semiotics, is geared towards being and experiencing. (Zainabu Jallo, Moving Matter: Worlds of Material Culture, DOI: 10.4324/9781003282334-1)

Material Culture in Transit: Theory and Practice constellates curators and scholars actively working with material culture within academic and museal institutions through theory and practice. The rich collection of essays critically addresses the multivalent ways in which mobility reshapes the characteristics of artefacts, specifically under prevailing issues of representation and colonial liabilities. The volume attests to material culture as central to understanding the repercussions of problematic histories and proposes novel ways to address them. It offers valuable reading for scholars of anthropology, museum studies, history and others with an interest in material culture.

In probing various representations of Vodun objects within European museums, cyberspace and other non-religious domains, Niklas Wolf scrutinises the agencies of West African Vodun objects in the political contexts of migration and globalisation. The „Material Culture of Vodun“ offers some indications of the meanings and instrumentality of a contemporary and globalised Vodun. Wolf raises questions on issues of „(im)mobilisation, appropriation, and continuous actualisation“ while introducing aspects of steadfast connections between Vodun’s display and material culture in West African shrines. (Niklas Wolf, The Material Culture of Vodun. Case Studies from Ghana, Togo, Germany and In-Between, DOI: 10.4324/9781003282334-11)

Research Niklas Wolf 2022 Nkyinkyim

20FebFebruary 20, 2023 By Niklas Wolf

While Western curators still use the very specific and mostly misused term „Voodoo“ — a term that often “is fraught with racist categories about black religious practice […]” (Desmangles 2012: 26) — to frame the multitude of spiritual practices, networks and epistemologies of Vodun, artistic and academic research starts to highlight the many meanings of Vodun in a globalized world. Contemporary institutions of displaying African spiritual and knowledge systems, like the Nkyinkyim Museum in Ada (Ghana), founded by artist Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, are rewriting those narratives, opening up international spaces between the sacred and the secular, leaving terminological and functional restrictions of the museum as well as the ones of a shrine behind.

Desmangles, Leslie G. “Replacing the Term ‚Voodoo’ with ‚Vodou’. A Proposal”, Journal of Haitian Studies, vol. 18, no. 2, 2012, 26–33. Web.

Research Niklas Wolf 2022

31AugFebruary 20, 2023 By Niklas Wolf

Back at the desk, back at home, reflecting on the many conditions of traveling, of seeing and being seen, the research, privileges, questions and time spent waiting in-between as well as the many conundrums (Landry 2019, 25) involved with such a journey.

Sites visited in Ghana are among others the Mamishie Rasta shrine in Dzita (Volta), led by Mami Wata priestess Mamishie Rasta, and Hunua Adoglos shrine in Volta (both of them publicly displaying visualisations of Vodun), the Afrikan Magick Temple in Accra (led by Christopher Voncujovi, publicly educating on Vodun, using social media and the catch-phrase ReVodution), and the Nkyinkyim Museum in Ada, combining aspects of a shrine and a museum, addressing local and global communities.

In Benin the Foret Sacree de Kpasse Ouidah (a museum and shrine, site for tourists and initiates at the same time), Daagbo Hounon Houna II, king of Vodun as well as the Mami Wata shrine at the Door of no Return were visited.

Traveling was accompanied by reading on the conundrums other researchers starting off as outsiders to the imagery and spirituality of Vodun have faced, and reflecting on their ways to dealing with the many questions rising: Landry, Timothy R.: Vodún. Secrecy and the Search for Divine Power, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019 (Print).

African Vodun. Art, Psychology, and Power

07MarMarch 23, 2022 By Niklas Wolf

Doing some critical re-reading of Suzanne Preston Blier: African Vodun. Art, Psychology, and Power (1995). The book (re)introduces western terminologies of art (like assemblage) to matter of Vodun (geographically and content wise not as broadly as its title might suggest though, focussing on the Fon, using bocio — figurative containers of power — as an example to follow some global traces of Vodun) by connecting certain pictorial practices to social phenomena, body politics and dynamics, discussing their aesthetics, modes of representation, materiality and meaning (including a stylistic analysis).

Suzanne Preston Blier: African Vodun. Art, Psychology, and Power. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. 1995. Print.