Berlin Science Week exhibition contribution

My contribution to the exhibition at Berlin Science Week (1-10 Nov), was about “Mapping the Social in 19th Century Art”, asking: How can we highlight social issues related to the works of art in public museums, bringing to the front what role these works have played in systems of power? Taking the Alte Nationalgalerie (Old National Gallery) in Berlin as a case study, we document attempts to collectively map the power in collections. All these examples come from seminars and workshops with students.

On top of these paintings from Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, you see diagrams of historical information provided by the museum in their online catalogue and from a project with art history students at TU Berlin, who were digging deeper into questions of power and violence in 19th century paintings. These diagrams were produced by students of Critical Data Studies in Aarhus in October 2023, who received in a workshop the info from the previous seminar.

These diagrams confront the usual concept of museum databases, where you would only have a limited scope of data about the paintings (size, author, medium, date, etc.) and then a historical perspective in a text description. Transforming the museum description and further historical research into diagrams, into a data graph, means to bring them in touch with what usually is considered museum data.

On the right you see a zine about the racist depiction of Romani people, which came out from another seminar at TU. There students refer to the critique of art history, formulated by Roma self-organisations and scholars and then analyzed a painting in the Alte Nationalgalerie as well. You can download the PDF here.