On the Margins: Collection Responsibilities of the National Gallery

Description

Restitution has emerged as a topical issue within and around museums in recent years, not least because of calls for decolonization from artists, activists, scholars, and cultural workers. However, this concern has predominantly affected Western museums categorized as “museums of ethnography,” which possess collections of numerous looted objects from (former) colonial areas. In contrast, art museums are rarely involved in debates on repatriation and rematriation.

For this paper, I posit that if Western art museums possess few objects that ought to be restituted, are they obliged instead to collect and represent works of art related to (former) empires? To be more specific, does the National Gallery of Denmark (Statens Museum for Kunst, SMK) have an obligation to acquire representative collections of art from, for example, the Faroe Islands and Greenland? Both countries are part of the Danish Realm, yet their art histories hold a marginal role in the collection of the SMK. In the paper, I will refer to the existing collections and the juridical texts to discuss a possible answer to my question.

Period	24 May 2024
Event title	Museum Why? : Practice, Agency and Knowledge in the Art Museum
Event type	Conference
Organisers	The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Practice-based Art Studies (PASS) at University of Copenhagen, Nordic art museum network Museum Why?
Sponsors	, Danish Arts Foundation , Nordic Culture Point
Location	Copenhagen, DenmarkShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International