Research

Conflict and Cooperation / Notes / Archive by category "Research"
“OUT OF FOCUS” Exhibition Lenbachhaus, Munich

“OUT OF FOCUS” Exhibition Lenbachhaus, Munich

“OUT OF FOCUS”, Leonore Mau and Haiti,

The upcoming exhibition at the Lenbachhaus is an artistic development of the research project “Out of Focus” by Dora Imhof and the artists’ collective U5 at the University of Zurich. Together with the cultural anthropologist and artist Gina Athena Ulysse, the artist and filmmaker Madafi Pierre, the houngan (priest), musician, and director general of the Bureau National d’Ethnologie in Port-au-Prince Erol Josué, and other scholars and artists, the exhibition develops a dialogical, critical, and productive approach to Mau’s images. The photographs will be shown at the Lenbachhaus in a multimedia, sensual environment. An essential component is an event program (during the exhibition period) in which the previous dialogues in and with the public are continued through performances and discussions. “Out of Focus” is a collaborative examination of Leonore Mau’s photographs taken in Haiti. The exhibition seeks a decolonial approach to these images and asks how working with this archive can contribute to changing the image of Haiti, which is still characterized by stereotypes today.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive four-language publication edited by Dora Imhof, Gina Athena Ulysse, and U5, published by Hatje Cantz.

Cooperation partners: S. Fischer Foundation, bpk-Bildagentur, Berlin

With generous support of Förderverein Lenbachhaus e.V.

Link: Lenbachhaus – Out of Focus

Relationalities and the Ethics of Viewing

Relationalities and the Ethics of Viewing

Zainabu Jallo & Berit Seidel: Relationalities and the Ethics of Viewing
Universität Zürich, ISEK – Populäre Kulturen (20.Nov. 2024)

In their talk, they will provide insights into their research project Out of Focus, in which they investigate the previously unpublished photographs taken in Haiti in the 1970s by Leonore Mau. Her pictures not only provide new insights and “potential histories” (Azoulay), they also pose a variety of ethical challenges. In dialog with people and institutions from Haiti and the Haitian diaspora, the process-oriented project searches for forms of dealing with Mau’s photographs that include not only artistic and art-historical research but also the structural and institutional level.

Launch “kritische berichte”

Launch “kritische berichte”

The new issue of the magazine “kritische berichte” is dedicated to visual justice. We’re very happy to be part of this issue which is edited by Christopher Nixon. In our text (in German) we present our work with the photographs of Leonore Mau. The launch of the magazine is on June 17, 6 pm 2024 (online).

You can read the text here:
Ein Schatz, eine Last, eine Chance Was tun mit Leonore Maus Haiti-Fotografien?

Talk Niklas Wolf KNIR Vodun’s Visuals

Talk Niklas Wolf KNIR Vodun’s Visuals

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)

Pèlerinage Toussaint Louverture au Fort de Joux

Pèlerinage Toussaint Louverture au Fort de Joux

On April 7 we joined the pilgrimage to Château de Joux which takes place every year to commemorate the death of Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture. The castle where Louverture was imprisioned by Napoleon Bonaparte is located right at the French-Swiss border. The Swiss historian Hans Fässler who co-founded the pilgrimage in 2002 maintains an excellent website where he writes:
“This traditional annual gathering on April 7 is a civic initiative in line with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Revolution of August 23, 1791 in Saint Domingue, requiring a genuine duty of remembrance, the right to history and the rehabilitation of General Toussaint Louverture who, through his fight for the triumph of the values of Liberty, Citizenship and Fraternity, embodies and universalizes Human Dignity.”

https://louverture.ch/pelerinage-toussaint-louverture/

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

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

publication Acquisition and Display Ethics Zainabu Jallo

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

publication Material Culture in Transit Zainabu Jallo 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

Research Niklas Wolf 2022 Nkyinkyim

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.

image: Nsiso or Nsodie (Akan), portrait-like memorial heads at the Nkyinkyim Museum. © Niklas Wolf 2022

Research Niklas Wolf 2022

Research Niklas Wolf 2022

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). 

image: shrine next to the Door of No Return (Mami Wata), Ouidah. © Niklas Wolf 2022