Contexts of Injustice: Dismantling Colonial Legacies from Berlin to London

Talking Culture

Author and curator Dan Hicks, best known for his book The Brutish Museums (2020), takes stock of the debate around the enduring legacies of empire in our museums, universities and society at large. In this episode, he talks about recent events in Europe and North America, from removing statues and un-naming buildings to returning artefacts from colonial museums. As a society how can we make amends for the past? And what are the next steps for upholding antiracism in the future?

In 2013, the German Museums Association (Deutscher Museumsbund) issued guidance on the treatment of human remains in museum collections, in which they introduced a novel concept. The idea of 'Unrechtskontext' (context of injustice) should, they suggested, guide curatorial ethics when assessing the circumstances in which museum collections were acquired. Among considerations here was not just the contexts of the past, but also whether any particular injustice 'continued to have an effect in the present'.

For the Goethe Annual Lecture 2021, Dan Hicks posed the following questions: How should we understand the 'Unrechtskontexte' of colonial legacies today? By the standards of the time - or by the values that we hold today? And how can these legacies be meaningfully dismantled?