WCSCD 2025/2026  educational program lecture series

Nina Montmann lecture is taking point of departure of her recently published book Decentering the Museum: Contemporary Art Institutions and Colonial legacy. Montmann in the book  acknowledges transition processes towards decolonization, de-elitiziation,  giving emphasis on importance of moving away from collection, exhibition policies that are based on European colonial legacy of institutional rituals that will be also addressed at the lecture.

To counter their dwindling relevance in a post-migrant society more and more modern and contemporary art museums are seeking approaches to decenter their collections, policies and infrastructures. In doing so, they can benefit from engaging with the discourses triggered by the restitution processes of the anthropological museum as well as the working methods of small art spaces. In this talk I will introduce the concept and practice of decentring as it can be applied to the museum. I will have a look at the example of the MASP/Museu de Arte São Paulo and the HKW in Berlin and focus on a series of exhibitions and projects that performed the interweaving of diverse colonial histories with imperial modernity that the art historian Ruth Iskin calls for.

 

Nina Montmann is mentor of WCSCD educational program 2025/2026 and she the lecture is organized as part of educational program public encounters in collaboration with SKUP and Sok Cooperative

 

Lecture will be in English

 

 

Nina Möntmann is Professor of Art Theory at the University of Cologne, curator and writer as well as Principal Investigator at the Global South Study Center (GSSC) at the University of Cologne. Before she has been Professor of Art Theory and the History of Ideas at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and curator at NIFCA, the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art in Helsinki. 

 

Curated projects include Naeem Mohaiemen: Langer Tag, Temporary Gallery, Cologne, 2023; Måns Wrange: Magic Bureaucracy, Tensta konsthall in Stockholm 2017; Fluidity, Kunstverein in Hamburg 2016; Harun Farocki A New Product (Deichtorhallen Hamburg, 2012); If we can't get it together. Artists rethinking the (mal)functions of community (The Power Plant, Toronto, 2008); The Jerusalem Show: Jerusalem Syndrome (together with Jack Persekian), 2009, Parallel Economies in India, (Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2006) and the Armenian Pavillion for the 52nd Venice Biennial. 

 

She participated in the long-term Israeli/Palestinian art and research project Liminal Spaces, and in 2010 was a research fellow at the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. She organized a number of symposia, such as Beyond Cynicism: Political Forms of Opposition, Protest and Provocation in Art, 2012, and New Communities, 2008 (both at Moderna Museet in Stockholm), We, Ourselves, and Us at the Power Plant in Toronto, 2009, and ReForming India - Artistic Collectives Bend International Art Practices at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School in New York, 2007.