The institution of the ethnological museum or world museum seems to be in
the midst of a serious crisis of choking. The delicacies that most of
these museums have acquired, which is to say co-opted, which is to say
ingested, seem to have collectively missed the track to the oesophagus and
got stuck in the respiratory tract. They have been stuck there for as long
as the history of mass collections, acquisitions and looting, for as long
as the ruthless and ongoing extraction of cultural property has occurred
in the former colonies outside of Europe.
A twelve-act essay on the maintenance of supremacy, the ethnological
Museum and the intricacies of the Humboldt Forum.
First published in the tenth issue (summer/fall 2018) of the journal South as a State of Mind.
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (born 1977 in Yaoundé, Cameroon, lives and
works in Berlin) is a curator, art critic, author and
biotechnologist. He is founder of SAVVY Contemporary
Berlin and of
SAVVY Journal for critical texts
on contemporary
African
art. He was associate professor at Muthesius University Kiel, and guest professor in curatorial studies at the Städelschule in
Frankfurt. He was curator-at-large for documenta 14, and was a guest
curator of the 2018 Dak'Art Biennale in Senegal. As part of the
Miracle
Workers Collective, he curated the Finnish Pavilion at the Venice
Biennale in 2019. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is the director of Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin since 2023.
