Search results for "Musée Guimet"

Museum coloniality : displaying Asian art in the whitened context

2021

The transformation of Musée Guimet and the transition of museums in the ‘countries of origin’ of its collections elucidates how white-cube crystallises Western cultural hegemony by erasing the colonial past of the objects and by representing the physical form of modernity. It contributes as well to nullifying the demand of repatriation, which seems to merely raise new power struggles rather than to recover indigenous beliefs (or identities). Through such a muséographie, the deities of the Other are ‘elevated’ from ethnographic specimen into art in the West while ‘diminished’ from sacred icons into art or historical artefacts in Asia. Museumification as such constitutes a whitening (Westerni…