Ghosts don't care if you believe in them

About

What happens to an object after it has been included in the museum context? To what extent does this context distort our image of (historical) reality? The exhibition, consisting of sculptures, paintings, drawings and video, shows that objects, instead of having a fixed place, move like ghosts in and between different locations, cultures, contexts and histories.

The works in the exhibition refer to colonial paintings, ethnographic and natural history museums. The exhibition deals with the way in which we tell stories through museum collections and how these mechanisms oscillate from objective academic research and forensic methodologies to subjective conservation rituals, that are often loaded with traces of colonial practices.

The exhibition explores the trajectory of mobility, reconstruction and conservation and asks questions about the idea of ​​museology and restoration. It is a reflection on the logic of the Carahiba revolution proposed by Oswald de Andrade in his Cannibal Manifesto of 1928 and aims to question what cultural cannibalism means today. One of the main axis of the project is understanding the cultural production as a rite of passage to the land of the dead; from a metabolic cycle that digests the old in order to create the new; to the ritualistic ceremony of preserving life where there is none.

This exhibition is part of Undercurrents: the overarching research subject of the programme for 2018-2019. Through its residency programme, exhibitions and publications, Hotel Maria Kapel investigates the relationship between historical and contemporary forms of movement such as colonialism, trade and migration, as well as the infrastructure and meaning of mobility in the cultural field. Visit undercurrents.nl for more information.