Candida Höfer

(b. 1944, Eberswalde, Germany; lives and works in Cologne)

Ethnologisches Museum Berlin III 2003
C-print, 85 x 85 cm
Courtesy of the artist
© Candida Höfer, Köln; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018

In his 2002 article “Museums in Late Democracies,” Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty distinguishes two types of knowledge among contemporary museum visitors: archival and experiential. The archival type is oriented toward strict classification. A visitor with experiential knowledge attempts to interact with the museum object directly. According to Chakrabarty, ethnographic museums in the twenty-first century have been forced to abandon archival methods in favor of the experiential approach. As a result of anti-colonialist criticism, access to museum objects has been opened up to representatives of the nationalities and communities that originally created them. Candida Höfer’s photograph, made a year after the publication of Chakrabarty’s article, shows the archival approach in its pure form. The brilliant white figures of ethnographers restoring artifacts from Africa without any physical contact seem to be incarnations of “academic models of knowledge” that “privilege information that, supposedly, the brain processes […] and marginalise the senses” (Chakrabarty, 11). Höfer recalls that she too had to wear a white chemical protection suit: “Ethnographers examine their objects as if they carry a hidden magic or even a curse.” The white suits form the boundary between the highly developed (and sterile) sphere of European civilization and other cultures, where smells, rituals, and direct interaction with objects are of paramount importance.