Speaker: Dr. Katja Müller,  researcher and research coordinator at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Area Studies, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Specialized in visual anthropology and ethnographic museums, she is currently working on impacts of digital processes concerning archives from India

 

Chair: Dr. Malavika Karlekar

 

Museums have entered the digital age. We can inform us online about visiting hours and events, and can view (parts of) the collections and archives that have been digitized. Pertaining to ethnographic museums in Europe, which are often based on collections gathered in colonial times, digitizing implies possibilities of access to a heritage that is a shared one: it is part of the originating culture as well as the storing one. 

 

In 2012 Indian curators from the Museum of Voice in Gujarat, in cooperation with a German and a British museum, started a unique project of making use of digitized photograph collections. The photos, that were taken in India between 1920 and 1950 and hidden in the European institutions until recently, became now of a new quality as their digital surrogates could reach out beyond the cabinets. They formed the basis for new perspectives and encounters