In this project funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the researchers aim to develop new, more equitable and sustainable ways of returning cultural goods from colonial contexts and reconnecting them with artists, scholars, communities and the wider public. “My aim is to put postcolonial and decolonial theory into practice and foster knowledge equity in museums and cultural heritage. As a result, my research not only focuses on cultural, political and economic entanglements past and present but also seeks to reshape them in collaborative film and exhibition projects,” says Junior Professor Dr. Julia Binter. She is also supporting the project “Artistic Research and Communal Knowledge. Building Trust for a Better Future.” This project is funded by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and aims to strengthen the dialog between urban and rural communities and across generations in Namibia, as well as promote the formation of knowledge with and about “cultural belongings” from colonial contexts.
The academic is currently developing two lines of research: “The Heritage of Mission” investigates colonial entanglements and the future potential of missionary collections. “In particular, I am examining the impact of missionary work on the body, ranging from changes in religious practices through to clothing styles, gender norms and healing practices,” explains Julia Binter. The second line of research is “The Heritage of Water,” which takes the current global water crisis, from extreme floods to droughts, as the starting point for carrying out research into the relationships between people and water from a global, comparative perspectives.
The social and cultural anthropologist has a background in theater, film and media studies and specializes in material culture, critical museum studies and cultural heritage studies. “I have worked in numerous transdisciplinary settings, including art museums and historical and ethnological museums, and with a variety of stakeholders from academia, art, activism, and cultural heritage,” she explains.
A key focus of her academic and curatorial work is analyzing the colonial entanglements of museums and their collections and developing innovative ways of bringing the various modes of knowledge formation with and about museum collections into dialog. “I see museums as a powerful and effective form of knowledge formation among many heritage practices,” says the Argelander Professor. Therefore, she is also studying, more broadly, how people engage with things – understood as images, artifacts, bodies, and the environment – in order to relate to the past, shape the present and envision possible futures.
Path to Bonn
Julia Binter studied social and cultural anthropology as well as theater, film and media studies at the University of Vienna and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She later received her PhD at the University of Oxford and was also a Wiener-Anspach fellow at the Université libre de Bruxelles. Binter was an assistant curator in the Africa department of the Weltmuseum Wien and a curatorial fellow of the German Federal Cultural Foundation at the Kunsthalle Bremen, where she curated the exhibition “The Blind Spot. Bremen, Colonialism and Art.” As a research associate for provenance research into collections from colonial contexts, she worked at the Ethnological Museum/ Central Archive of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin before she accepted the post of Argelander Professor for Critical Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of Bonn. She is Deputy Director of the Global Heritage Lab, co-founder of the transdisciplinary research network “Colonial Ports and Global History” at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, a member of additional networks and associations, has curated numerous exhibitions and film festivals and published a wide range of work.
The Argelander Professorships
The goal of the Argelander Professorships for early-career-researchers (named after the Bonn astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm August Argelander, 1799-1875) is to expand the research profile of the six transdisciplinary research areas at the University of Bonn, in which researchers work together on questions relevant to the future across the boundaries of individual disciplines and faculties.
