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Clémentine Deliss (ed.), Yvette Mutumba (ed.), ...: Foreign Exchange

Clémentine Deliss (ed.), Yvette Mutumba (ed.), Weltkulturen Museum (ed.)

Foreign Exchange
(or the stories you wouldn't tell a stranger)

Softcover, 320 pages

Stories you wouldn't tell a stranger

Foreign Exchange raises critical questions around the scientific and educational remit of an ethnographic museum in Germany and highlights its unspoken relationship to global trade. This publication investigates the historical accumulation and commodification of artefacts and the representation of the human body as seen on ethnographic photographs. New material developed out of artistic research in the Weltkulturen Labor is presented together with unpublished scientific photography. Extended conversations between internationally renowned anthropologists, art historians, curators and artists offer new connections between past and present. Foreign Exchange responds to current interest in the remediation of ethnographic collections, colonial history, historical archives, and interdisciplinary curatorial practice.


Contributing authors and artists: Peggy Buth, Minerva Cuevas, Tom McCarthy, Gabriel Gbadamosi, David Lau, David Weber-Krebs, Luke Willis-Thompson.

  • cultural studies
  • ethnology
  • museum
  • curatorial practice
  • trade
  • archive
  • colonialism
  • exhibition
  • collection
  • photography
  • anthropology
  • body
  • contemporary art

»An exhibition in which Frankfurt’s Weltkulturen Museum casts a critical and wise eye on the history of ethnological forays.« Frankfurter Rundschau

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Clémentine Deliss

Clémentine Deliss

former director of the Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt am Main (April 2010–May 2015). She was born in London and studied contemporary art in Vienna and social anthropology in Vienna, Paris and London. Her PhD focused on the relationship between ethnographic collections and the institutional development of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. From 1992–95, she was the artistic director of Africa 95, a festival of the Royal Academy of Arts. From 1998–99 she was Guest Professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Between 2003–10 she ran the long-term research project Future Academy in Edinburgh, Senegal, India, the US, Australia and Japan. As an international art laboratory, it investigated the development of new interdisciplinary models of future arts institutions. Between 1996–2007, she published the artists’ and writers’ organ ›Metronome‹ that was presented twice at documenta in Kassel. From 2015–2016 Deliss was a researcher at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Other texts by Clémentine Deliss for DIAPHANES
Yvette Mutumba

Yvette Mutumba

has been the research curator for Africa at the Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt am Main since March 2012. Mutumba is furthermore co-initiator of the Online-Magazine Contemporary And (C&). She studied Art History and History at the Freie Universität in Berlin and holds a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London. Her dissertation focussed on questions regarding the representation of art from Africa and the Diaspora in the German context from the 1960s to 2011. She has published numerous texts on issues concerning visual arts from African perspectives. From 2006 to 2012 she has initiated and advised projects in cooperation with institutions such as the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart and the German Foreign Office.

Weltkulturen Museum

The Weltkulturen Museum was founded in 1904. It is located in three villas, which are situated on Frankfurt’s Museum Embankment (Museumsufer). The museum houses a unique collection of artefacts from Oceania, Africa, Southeast Asia as well as North, Central and Southern America. The collection extends to an image archive with historic and contemporary ethnographic photographs and documentary films as well as a library. An outstanding feature of the Weltkulturen Museum is its emphasis on the productive relationship between advanced anthropological research, contemporary artistic praxis, innovative methods of analysis, translation and education.

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