Art Residency (all media), January-March 2023 at MARKK, Museum am Rothenbaum – World Cultures and Arts

The Art Residency is awarded to a promising and exceptional artist working in all forms of media (visual, graphic, literary, performance, etc.) who will stay in Hamburg for three months within the framework of the program MARKK in Motion funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation).

The Museum am Rothenbaum, one of the premier ethnographic museums in Germany, is currently in a major repositioning process that includes a new conceptualization of the permanent display, a reconfiguration of the program and a critical engagement with its own institutional history and the history of its collection.

Thematic Focus:

The museum invites an international, emerging artist to engage with the Oceania collections of the MARKK. The starting point for the artistic exploration will be the museum’s holdings from the Marshall Islands and related areas. Central to the project are the cultural expressions and skills embedded in the ornate dress mats known as jaki-ed. The materiality of these works is to be considered as well as design and ornamentation in their social references. Connections to the designs of baskets and fans are to be traced, as well as the historical implications of the changes in clothing style. The reflection should take into account the nexus of island ecologies and the transformations, deprivations and reactivations of skills. Considering the impact of collection building and ethnographic research embedded in colonial contexts is crucial to this approach.

In addition, the receiver of the residency is to incorporate the results of the current provenance research project at the MARKK into the artistic work. This project focusses on the origins of collections from several regions with a former German colonial presence in connection with the Hamburg world trade of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The MARKK encourages projects that engage with the holdings by addressing the history of museum collections and the (post-)colonial legacy, critiques of representation and the production of difference, untold stories and counter-narratives, transnational identities in Hamburg, among other possible approaches. What are the missing pieces and untold stories of the objects in this context? The MARKK aims to work with an artist who specializes in similar questions and can thus engage in a fruitful artistic dialogue with the institution.

Activities and outcome of the residency:

Development and creation of a work of art which will be exhibited atMARKK

Assisting with the implementation of the artwork into the context of the exhibition; performing co-curatorial tasks

Participation in one internal workshop

Artist Talk or other public event at the museum during the residency

Participation in at least one publication format, including the provision of visual/graphic and text material