Anna Szöke
Executive and Research Manager
Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage - CARMAH
Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt University Berlin
As CARMAH’s new Geschäftsführerin and research manager my role is to assist director Sharon Macdonald in the strategic advancement of the centre and its research projects. I also support CARMAH’s researchers in national and international research funding applications, with developing scientific events and collaborations, managing public relations, and with organizational tasks related to employment and scientific work.
I am also part of the TRACES project (Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts: From Intervention to Co-Production). My research is focusing on three of the Creative Co-Productions (CCPs) — multidisciplinary teams of artists, researchers and places of heritage encounters. I am looking at their engagements with collections of difficult heritages, particularly those with the material culture of the human body and death, and their often troubling and violent history. I am interested how the CCPs engage with the emotional responses these collections usually provoke, the special care they demand, and how they utilize their potential of transmitting difficult heritages within Europe. Furthermore, I would like to analyze the CCPs as a new concept of mediating contentious collections and to assess them as examples for reflexive heritage and beyond institutional critique.
As a member of the CCP Dead Images, a collaboration between the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the University of Edinburgh and the Natural History Museums, Vienna, which explores the philosophical, aesthetic, historical and scientific implications of collections of human skulls. My research focuses on the Viennese Natural History Museum’s collection and similar collections in Europe. I explore the role of these collections in the development of anthropology and their practices of collecting from the 19th century until today. I look at how exhibition policies in Austria and Germany have developed and are intertwined with provenance research and repatriation claims, and how these influence public discourses.
www.carmah.berlin
http://www.carmah.berlin/people/szoke-anna/
www.tracesproject.eu
Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage - CARMAH
Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt University Berlin
As CARMAH’s new Geschäftsführerin and research manager my role is to assist director Sharon Macdonald in the strategic advancement of the centre and its research projects. I also support CARMAH’s researchers in national and international research funding applications, with developing scientific events and collaborations, managing public relations, and with organizational tasks related to employment and scientific work.
I am also part of the TRACES project (Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts: From Intervention to Co-Production). My research is focusing on three of the Creative Co-Productions (CCPs) — multidisciplinary teams of artists, researchers and places of heritage encounters. I am looking at their engagements with collections of difficult heritages, particularly those with the material culture of the human body and death, and their often troubling and violent history. I am interested how the CCPs engage with the emotional responses these collections usually provoke, the special care they demand, and how they utilize their potential of transmitting difficult heritages within Europe. Furthermore, I would like to analyze the CCPs as a new concept of mediating contentious collections and to assess them as examples for reflexive heritage and beyond institutional critique.
As a member of the CCP Dead Images, a collaboration between the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the University of Edinburgh and the Natural History Museums, Vienna, which explores the philosophical, aesthetic, historical and scientific implications of collections of human skulls. My research focuses on the Viennese Natural History Museum’s collection and similar collections in Europe. I explore the role of these collections in the development of anthropology and their practices of collecting from the 19th century until today. I look at how exhibition policies in Austria and Germany have developed and are intertwined with provenance research and repatriation claims, and how these influence public discourses.
www.carmah.berlin
http://www.carmah.berlin/people/szoke-anna/
www.tracesproject.eu
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (7)
Uploads
Papers by Anna Szöke
The Dead Images exhibition was created, not only to raise discussions on many levels – in public, within the scientific community, between museums practitioners and heritage communities - but also to try out new formats of engagement with the topic of human skull collections. The exhibition was planned as product and process at the same time (Butler/Lehrer 2016). A testing ground or, what the anthropologist George Marcus might describe as an experimental research site (Marcus 2010), to learn and understand together with the visitors how and whether we can (literally) face uncomfortable pasts. One of these engagement tools was the biographical tour - and the subsequent usage of biographies- during which fragments of the life and death stories of individuals whose skulls are held at the anthropological department of the Natural History Museum Vienna (NHM Vienna) were discussed. We were guided by the following research questions: How do visitors perceive human skulls? How does biographical and contextual information change the visitor experience?
Here I reflect on the conceptual and practical challenges of trying to trace the biographies of some individuals skulls kept at the NHM Vienna in order to create the biographical tours. In doing so, I will draw on my personal encounters with visitors during the tours to analyze this particular format.
Conference contributions by Anna Szöke
For more information see: http://www.tracesproject.eu/
Conference Presentations by Anna Szöke
5th Biennial Conference 26.08.2020-30.08.2020
University College London, UK
Sub-Theme: Arts and Creative Practice
Decolonizing Museum Cultures and Collections:
Mapping Theory and Practice in East-Central Europe
International conference for heritage scholars and practitioners
October 21-24, 2020
Museums of Natural history, world cultures (formerly and sometimes still known as ethnographic museums), anatomical and medical museums hold bodily remains from ancient but also more recent history. They are traces of past lives and bear witness to the livings relationship to the dead but also to remaining structural unequal power relations. Departing from an ongoing long-term collaboration with colleagues from the Natural History Museum Vienna (NHM Vienna) and the research project TRACES 1 (Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts. From Intervention to Co-Production), this paper analyzes how the human story of these bodily traces, incites new ways of research methodologies based on interdisciplinary (artistic, ethnographic, historical,...) approaches, and can be opportunities for transmitting difficult (imperial / colonial) heritages. How can the collective but also personal engagement with collections of human remains evoke changes in present institutional structures, foster future collaborations and build new relationships? Can it contribute to deconstruct (neo)colonial systems that are lingering on? What are the ethical implications in engaging with these collections-Some individual's remains at the NHM Vienna were collected under violent and ethically questionable circumstances. To shed light on this collection's histories, the paper unravels how Viennese collectors of the 19 th and 20 th century were entangled in the networks of the Imperial (Mapping and categorizing the inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and Colonial Project (Collecting and classifying human crania from overseas). Stressing Vienna's function as a center of knowledge transfer with easy access to human corpses 2 between Eastern and Western Europe, the paper focuses on examples from a series of creative-reflexive public engagements with the NHM's human remains collection. By doing so, it discusses if and how the analyzed formats can contribute in building ethical-reflexive and decolonial futures.
The Dead Images exhibition was created, not only to raise discussions on many levels – in public, within the scientific community, between museums practitioners and heritage communities - but also to try out new formats of engagement with the topic of human skull collections. The exhibition was planned as product and process at the same time (Butler/Lehrer 2016). A testing ground or, what the anthropologist George Marcus might describe as an experimental research site (Marcus 2010), to learn and understand together with the visitors how and whether we can (literally) face uncomfortable pasts. One of these engagement tools was the biographical tour - and the subsequent usage of biographies- during which fragments of the life and death stories of individuals whose skulls are held at the anthropological department of the Natural History Museum Vienna (NHM Vienna) were discussed. We were guided by the following research questions: How do visitors perceive human skulls? How does biographical and contextual information change the visitor experience?
Here I reflect on the conceptual and practical challenges of trying to trace the biographies of some individuals skulls kept at the NHM Vienna in order to create the biographical tours. In doing so, I will draw on my personal encounters with visitors during the tours to analyze this particular format.
For more information see: http://www.tracesproject.eu/
5th Biennial Conference 26.08.2020-30.08.2020
University College London, UK
Sub-Theme: Arts and Creative Practice
Decolonizing Museum Cultures and Collections:
Mapping Theory and Practice in East-Central Europe
International conference for heritage scholars and practitioners
October 21-24, 2020
Museums of Natural history, world cultures (formerly and sometimes still known as ethnographic museums), anatomical and medical museums hold bodily remains from ancient but also more recent history. They are traces of past lives and bear witness to the livings relationship to the dead but also to remaining structural unequal power relations. Departing from an ongoing long-term collaboration with colleagues from the Natural History Museum Vienna (NHM Vienna) and the research project TRACES 1 (Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts. From Intervention to Co-Production), this paper analyzes how the human story of these bodily traces, incites new ways of research methodologies based on interdisciplinary (artistic, ethnographic, historical,...) approaches, and can be opportunities for transmitting difficult (imperial / colonial) heritages. How can the collective but also personal engagement with collections of human remains evoke changes in present institutional structures, foster future collaborations and build new relationships? Can it contribute to deconstruct (neo)colonial systems that are lingering on? What are the ethical implications in engaging with these collections-Some individual's remains at the NHM Vienna were collected under violent and ethically questionable circumstances. To shed light on this collection's histories, the paper unravels how Viennese collectors of the 19 th and 20 th century were entangled in the networks of the Imperial (Mapping and categorizing the inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and Colonial Project (Collecting and classifying human crania from overseas). Stressing Vienna's function as a center of knowledge transfer with easy access to human corpses 2 between Eastern and Western Europe, the paper focuses on examples from a series of creative-reflexive public engagements with the NHM's human remains collection. By doing so, it discusses if and how the analyzed formats can contribute in building ethical-reflexive and decolonial futures.