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Subproject 2: The (In)Authenticity of “minkisi” (Congo): Translations and Musealisations of Power Objects in and from the Contact Zone

PD Dr. Paola Ivanov; Dr. Ursula Helg

In focusing upon minkisi power objects from the Congo, Subproject 2 examines an important type of transculturally generated and negotiated object from the African continent. Hybrid in design and materials, and considered by local actors to be furnished with power, these objects have their origins in the zone of contact that has existed since the 15th century between West Africa and Europe and which became relevant in particular in the late 19th and early 20th century in conjunction with fetishism as a figure of discourse projected onto Africa.

The project investigates the changing temporal and geographical concretions of the fetish/fetishism, both in museum collections of minkisi and in their discursive and artistic translations from the late 19th century right up to the present. In the diasporic trajectories of these objects between Europe, America and Africa, the fundamental ambivalence of modernism makes itself visible in different figurations, as likewise do breaks and inconsistencies in dominant selection and fictionalization strategies that, through the minkisi, were intended to mark a time differential, imagined in evolutionistic terms, between Africa and Europe. Divergent local practices and regimes of perception raise questions regarding the agency of local actors and the (in)authenticity of collections, while above all in the Afro-American and contemporary African context, authenticated identities generate themselves in the form of emancipatory strategies through the recourse to these power objects.

The example of the minkisi is particularly suitable as a means of illuminating the diachronic dimension of production and reception networks of aesthetic forms of expression and the collision of local concepts of ‘power’ and western concepts of authenticity, and hence of providing both theoretical and methodological bases for a fruitful extension of the actor-network theory to art history.

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