Minor Curating. Art and Anthropology After the World Museum (Jonas Tinius)

This talk draws on Tinius' current research and book project about practices of curating narratives of world across and after the European museum of world. It documents and analyses artistic and curatorial narratives of world-production that respond to the crisis of the Western universal museum and its colonial legacies. Against the backdrop of the reconstruction of the contentious Humboldt Forum on Berlin’s museum island, this book accompanies several exhibition-makers in Germany, Italy, and France to develop an argument for what a minor form of curating art and anthropology after the museum of world could be. In doing so, it traces how these curators grapple with and trouble narratives about European cultural and colonial heritage in the present. Taking cue from discussions on minor literature, which reckons with the insertion of non-normative narratives into major forms of cultural production, it proposes to think of minor curating as a possible construction of a minor world heritage from concrete contexts and artistic as well as curatorial practices. Through collaborative, multimodal, and experimental modes of fieldwork, which include curating and exhibition-making itself, this talk also reflects on what consequences this form of curating after world may have for fieldwork on and in the midst of these transformations.

Jonas Tinius is scientific coordinator and postdoctoral researcher in cultural anthropology in the ERC project Minor Universality. Narrative World Constructions After Western Universalism (PI: Markus Messling, Saarland University). He is associate member of CARMAH at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. After completing the Archaeology and Anthropology Tripos, he received his PhD from the University of Cambridge for an ethnography of German theatre and migration. At Cambridge, he also convened the CRASSH seminar series network on Interdisciplinary Performance and was president of CUSAS. Together with Margareta von Oswald, he is editor of Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial (Leuven University Press, 2020, open-access). His ethnographic research focuses on the social grappling with art, nation, identity, migration, and colonial legacies, looking in particular at institutionalized forms of cultural production (theaters, museums, and galleries) and the reflexive agency of artistic and curatorial work.