The Chinese paravent - how colonialism entered German living rooms

Paravent, tea service, spears, shield and parrot: Nicola Kuhn presents artefacts that tell us a lot about the colonial era. Brought back by missionaries, soldiers, settlers or traders as trophies and mementos, each object always conceals the tragedy of an occupied country and the people who lived there. The artefacts bear witness to extreme violence, supposedly peaceful coexistence, radical exploitation, but also attempts at rapprochement. The current owners, who have to find a way of dealing with this legacy, also speak out.

Nicola Kuhn thus creates a narrative panorama of German colonial rule. She believes that after a century of silence, it is time to get a picture.

The reading will be followed by a discussion with Markus Wurzer.

Nicola Kuhn, born in 1962, is an art critic and has been editor of the Tagesspiegel feuilleton since 1991. She studied art history and modern history, taught at the FU Berlin and received the critics' prize from the hbs Kulturstiftung. She is the author of several publications, including Rudolf Zwirner. Ich wollte immer Gegenwart and Hitler's Art Dealer, the biography of Hildebrand Gurlitt.

Markus Wurzer is a contemporary historian and postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle an der Saale, Germany. He is co-coordinator of www.postcolonialitaly.com and member of the Steering Committee of “Evidence and Imagination – Special Editions”. Wurzer has received numerous prizes for his work, including the 2016 award of the Dr. Alois Mock Europa-Stiftung for his MA thesis and the 2019 award of the Theodor Körner Fonds for his dissertation.

Duration: 90 min.
To participate in the event, all guests need a valid museum ticket (or an annual ticket, a KHMembership or a membership of the Weltmuseum Wien Friends).
Registration online  (limited number of participants)
Meeting point: WMW Forum