ART on view 98 FIG. 10: Installation by David Weber-Krebs including navigational maps from Ralik Ratak, Marshall Islands, Micronesia. 19th–20th century. Acquired by H. Breitkopf. Photo: Wolfgang Günzel, Weltkulturen Labor, 2013. Krebs rewrote 50,000 entries from the museum’s records, creating a text that, at least theoretically, allows for better understanding of the museum’s collection, although it nonetheless remains impossible to grasp the information— and consequently the collection—in its entirety. He demonstrates that the data and the problems in the evaluation of an ethnological collection are subject to individual experience. Finally, Cuevas focused on pecuniary questions and the attribution of values. She studied the capitalist need to consume the “other,” likening it to a form of cannibalism that also gave rise to the creation of ethnological collections. In addition to these art projects, three workshops preceded the opening of the exhibition. Ethnologists, philosophers, historians, art historians, sociologists, and international artists discussed the show’s themes at length. Extracts from the debates can be read on the exhibition galleries’ walls as well as in the catalog, alongside essays by Gabriel Gbadamosi (Great Britain), Tom McCarthy (Great Britain), and attorney David Lau (USA/Taiwan). The exhibition also examines various styles of studio photography of objects, from past decades up to the present. Such photographs were often used for the commercialization of ethnographic objects in catalogs, slide shows, or on postcards. They display a particular way of “exoticizing” the objects: Ritual masks and utilitarian objects alike are lit with spotlights to accentuate their effect, and colored backgrounds are added in such a way as to compensate for the lack of information available about their original contexts. Some of the objects in the installation are displayed in juxtaposition with such photographs of them to demonstrate how perceptions have altered. The display also includes artistic photographs selected by the participants. These function as visual counterpoints to the iconographic material in question, and the dialog that ensues between the studio photographs and the contemporary artworks leads to fresh ideas, in that it opens new perspectives about the photography of ethnographic objects. The installation also presents photographs whose subjects are the people who were at the heart of international commercial interests from the closely related fields of medicine and anthropology. In addition to these interests, the dissemination of Christian beliefs played an important role. Both physicians and missionaries had the technical wherewithal and the official status needed to take photographs that would today be considered exploitative and offensive. The exhibition includes race typology studies by Bernhard Hagen, a physician who was active in a number of colonies before he cofounded the Weltkulturen Museum in 1904, as well as other photographs of similar kind by missionaries Martin Gusinde and Paul Schebesta.
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