curatorial research fellowship

Gerda Henkel Fellowship-Programme „4 Museums – 4 Opportunities“

The Museum am Rothenbaum- World Cultures and Arts (MARKK) in Hamburg, Germany is offering a two-year fellowship for African curators or scholars from April 2023

The fellowship programme, funded by the German Gerda Henkel Foundation, aims at supporting four German museums holding African collections– in Leipzig/Dresden/Herrnhut (Saxony), Hamburg, Cologne, and Stuttgart – in their engagement to decolonize their museum practice and to foster a new ethics of collaboration with the African continent. It offers 4 promising African candidates based on the continent an opportunity to become a team member of a German museum and to pursue their own exhibition, educational or research project and contribute to the overall development of the museum, while at the same time building on their professional experience.

All four museums have been actively involved in the German debate about colonial heritage and restitution for many years and are in a reflexive, comprehensive process of transformation. In this process, they are looking for a responsible approach to the collections and their history, for new forms of presentation and collection practices, as well as for transdisciplinary formats in scholarship, exhibitions, and outreach. The four fellows are invited to contribute to this process of creating an ethically responsible and contemporary museum practice allowing a renegotiation of interpretive sovereignties and multifaceted museum stories to be told beyond the Eurocentric perspective. This can only be achieved with the help of participatory, collaborative, and cooperative formats in inclusive partnership with descendants of the societies and communities that created and once used the collections the museums are currently holding. Four two-year fellowships have been approved at the Staatliche Ethnographische Sammlungen Sachsen in Leipzig, the Museum am Rothenbaum - Kulturen und Künste der Welt (MARKK) in Hamburg, the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum – Cultures of the World in Cologne, and the Linden-Museum in Stuttgart.