Summer School 2013 "Situating Media" - Participants

Anna Brus (Siegen)

Contesting the Exhibitionary Order. Julius Lips and the Inverted Gaze

This research project explores the circulation and exhibition of non-european artifacts in the German Weimarer Republic. While Avantgarde artists collected and used non-European artifacts for challenging European art history and artistic conventions, at least partially, the turn to primitivism was driven by the search for the origin of human expression and established a particular way of Othering. 

At the same time, a more radical turn to non-European worlds and artifacts challenged the exhibitionary order of colonialism. Julius Lips, a museum director and anthropologist at Cologne collected images of the Colonial Europeans for an exhibition project published later under the title “The Savage hits back”. By collecting depictions of Europeans by non-European artists he inverted the colonial gaze towards the colonial subject and challenged norms and conventions of his Western contemporaries. 

Revealing the brutal force of colonialism, and returning the gaze of the other upon the Europeans, the objects affect and act upon the spectator in unprecedented fashion. Even though Lips was prevented from realizing the exhibition by the Nazis, his collection established an exhibitionary order of radical contemporaneity, perhaps even beyond his own intentions. This story of cultural contact and estrangement, should be reconstructed along the situated practices and various mediations that occurred among and between artists in and outside of Europe, collectors, traders, museum curators, art critics and the general public.

Anna Katharina Brus
has studied Islamic Studies and Art History in Bonn, Bochum, Cairo, and Tübingen. She is interested in postcolonial art-history, intercultural aesthetics and contemporary, modern and primitivist art.
anna.brus@uni-siegen.de

Recent Publications
2013: “Die ganze Welt in Farbe. Fotografische Erkundungen des Fremden und Eigenen in der kolonialen Moderne,” in: Ausstellungskatalog zur Ausstellung “Städte der Welt. Frühe Farbfoto­grafien aus dem Musée Albert Kahn im Dialog mit der fotografischen Sammlung,” Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf (in press).
2009: “Trophäen der Vorstellungskraft” (with Martin Zillinger), in: Ausstellungskatalog zur Aus­stellung “Johannes Brus. Giving Picture for Trophy,” Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, 54–62.