Conference Program

In an attempt to unveil the "exhibitionary complex" (Tony Bennett) inherent in Europeanization, this conference presents contributions from both scholars based on their theoretical and empirical work and from practitioners with a theoretical interest. With this aim, presentations on the three topics described below will be given:

Europeans on Display

Putting ‘Europe' in a nutshell, it is tempting to choose a biographical approach. Thus, narratives of European integration history can draw upon the myth of the ‘founding fathers', their life stories and political achievements. At the same time, individual citizens can be employed to explicate European as transnational identity by telling stories about their intercultural experiences as migrants and students. Moreover, the increasingly all-pervasive use of eyewitnesses in museums constitutes a form of biographical representation strategy for creating European narratives.

  • Wolfram Kaiser (UK): From Great Men to Ordinary Citizens? The Biographical Approach to Narrating European Integration History in Museums
  • Steffi de Jong (NO): The Figure of the Witness in Second World War Museums
  • Ines Keske (DE): How a Swabian Dynasty Became European. The Two so-called Staufer Exhibitions of 1977 and 2010 in Comparison
  • Anne Overbeck (DE): Is Everything that Moves a European? On the Chances and Risks of Using a Biographical Approach to Display Abstract Phenomena

Comments and Discussion by Guido Vaglio (IT) and Wolfgang Kaschuba (DE)

Centre & Periphery

This panel wants to relate this empirical and epistemological shift to the museum field: is there such a thing as a peripheral museal gaze on Europe – and how is it represented through displays in both museums and temporary exhibitions?

  • Kerstin Poehls (DE): Europe, Blurred: Migration, Margins and the Museum
  • Ljiljana Radonic (AT): Croatia - Exhibiting Memory and History on the ´Shores of Europe´
  • Waltraut Bayer (AT): Europe - Russia - Europa
  • Torgeir Bangstad (NO): A Future in Ruins: Post-Industrial Landscapes as Deterritorialized Heritage

Comments and Discussion by Nikolay Vukov (BG) and Klas Grinell (SE)

Collecting Europe

The panel provides presentations that deal with the idea of a European collection (also digital) or analyse those processes and institutions that re-define single objects and/ or collections in a setting of European values and meaning.

  • Stefan Krankenhagen (NO): Collecting Europe. Together? Strategies and Aporia of Collecting Today
  • Gabriela Nicolescu (RO): Insertions: Experimants of Art in an Ethnographical Museum
  • Alec Badenoch (NL): Harmonized Spaces, Dissonant Objects, Making Europe? National and Local Collections in a Collaborative Digital Platform
  • Nanna Thylstrup (DK): Europeana and the Differences between Public and Commercial Digitization in Europe

Comments and Discussion by Brita Brenna (NO) and isabelle Benoit (BE)

The Opening Lecture will be given by Gerard Delanty (UK): After the End of the Grand Narratives: Representing European Heritage. Kjersti Bale (NO) will introduce and comments will be given by Thomas Hylland Eriksen (NO).

You can find a detailed schedule here.

Exhibiting Europe Program