Series | Studi e ricerche
Edited book | Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe
Chapter | Rendering Race Through a Paranoid Postsocialist Lens
Rendering Race Through a Paranoid Postsocialist Lens
Activist Curating and Public Engagement in the Postcolonial Debate in Eastern Europe
Abstract
This chapter engages with the heated public debate on racial representation and colonial history that arose around Kumu Art Museum’s exhibition Rendering Race (2021) in Estonia. As an academic activist intervention, it proposed an important shift by changing racist titles of artworks from the twentieth century and thereby for the first time in the museum’s practice considered minority groups as its publics. The chapter analyses the curatorial strategies used and the key points of contention in the public debate to consider what it revealed and obscured about Eastern Europe’s relationship to the aftermath of European colonialism.
Submitted: July 13, 2022 | Accepted: Oct. 21, 2022 | Published Jan. 26, 2023 | Language: en
Keywords Estonian art • Activist curating • Renaming • Postcolonial Europe • Eastern Europe • Postsocialism
Copyright © 2023 Redi Koobak, Margaret Tali. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-677-0/011
