Constructing History and Subalternity in the Museum: A Critical Analysis of Museum Exhibtions

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in the Museum

A Critical Analysis of Exhibition Practices

Master Thesis

Comparative Cultural Analysis

June 2014

Name: Linda van Gool Student number: 6052347 Supervisor: mw. dr. N. Roei

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Introduction

The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light. The wooden floor is polished so that you click along clinically, or carpeted so that you pad soundlessly, resting the feet while the eyes have

at the wall. The art is free, as the saying used to go, ‘to take on its own life.’

(O’Doherty 15)

The public museum is a well-established institution in Western society. Although it is subject to change as the culture of which the institution is part of changes, its public is familiar with, receptive of and open to the workings of this institution and its expositions. The act of exposing something in a museum exhibition is in Mieke Bal’s analysis in her book Double

Exposures, a discursive act saying: “look” and “that’s how it is” (2). The idea of exposing

something in a museum then means for the visitor entering into a dialogue with the museum and its objects on display. This creates a dynamic between museum, object and visitor where the exhibition narrative constructs for example an aesthetical or learning experience. This dynamic is however not as transparent as O’Doherty’s white cube suggests. Art is said to be free; yet, the act of exposing has consequences for the way in which the public perceives the objects on display, no matter how white and clinical the museum presents itself. According to Mieke Bal, the museum as institution “interferes” with the experience of its visitors

implicating that “the ‘pure’ aesthetic experience” the white cube ostensibly offers, is impossible (“Exposing the Public” 525). The effects, either positive or negative, of these interferences in exhibitions will central in this thesis.

The three exhibitions discussed in the following chapters have in common that they are all concentrated on themes of representing and remembering a part of history. The museums create exhibitions where objects are put into place to relate a narrative on these different histories and make them accessible and attractive for its contemporary public. In the photography museum in Amsterdam, the exhibition The Citadel centralizes photographs made by documentary photographer Kaveh Golestan that relate to the events surrounding the Iranian revolution of 1979. The works by Kara Walker in the overview exhibition in the Walker Art Center in Minnesota, My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love display cut-out figures in the historical setting of pre-Civil War America. The paintings and historical artifacts in The Netherlands Overseas, a thematic room in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam narrate a part of Dutch colonial history. From these three exhibitions, a visitor

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can learn something about a part of history but their act of exposing can also attribute to a cultural memory. The three different exhibitions all have different aims with their act of exposing and telling their stories on these parts of history. This thesis will look into these exhibitions and how Bal’s interferences work within the dynamic between museum, objects and visitor; where negative interferences can be found but the analysis will also looking into what can be considered as positive interferences on the experience of the objects in the museum by the public.

The notions of history and memory are related but not the same. Pierre Nora finds their difference in the idea that history is a reconstruction of a past event whereas memory is a “perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present” (8). The museum as cultural institution brings these two seemingly opposite notions back together by creating a collective experience of historic events for its visitors:

For many, museums perform the externalized function of their own brains: it

remembers, for them, what is most valuable and essential in culture and science and yet generations of curators and visitors have inhabited the institution, actively shaping (and necessarily changing) those memories over time. (Crane “The Conundrum” 98) In the dynamic of museum, object and visitor, the museum creates a historical narrative by means of artworks and artifacts in order to shape an experience of this history for the visitors. This experience will then, become a part of the memory of the visitor. What is essential for this experience is that it is actively shaped by the museum through an exhibition narrative: it brings together the separate objects into one experience.

In her book, Bal centralizes exhibition practices and characterizes these as informative as well as affirmative: “the discourse has a truth value: the proposition it conveys is either true or false.” This means that the objects inform and affirm the exhibition narrative the museum constructs and work as the “signs” which tell the exhibition’s story. Initially, these historical artifacts are however not specifically made to be such a sign; there is a discrepancy between the object and what it has come to represent (3-4). This discrepancy is where the interferences of the museum limit the artwork from “taking on its own life” and shape it into an object that informs and affirms the public’s expectations. This is not necessarily a negative practice but can, as will be shown in this thesis, address or veil problems surrounding the power of exposing.

Parts of the historical narratives in these three exhibitions are the people who lived at the time. Within the historical exhibition, also these people become the signs with which their

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history is told. Their identity is then also actively shaped by the exhibition narrative through the objects on display. What comes into play here is the power of representation. The

museum and its narrative have the power to display a representation of people in history and present this to its public. However, this is not a one way direction from museum to visitors as Crane also addresses:

An awareness of the audience's expectations and a desire to meet them has had a profound influence on museum exhibition practices in the later twentieth century. This attempt to create a dialogue between museums and their publics reflects a change in attitudes since the nineteenth century (“Memory” 47).

Crane foregrounds the museum’s consciousness on the needs and expectations of its visitor. The constructions of identity presented in a museum, then, are also shaped in a way that reflects the expectations of the museum’s visitor. Thus, looking at the interferences of the exhibition narrative, it tells us as much about the historical events themselves as it does about the institutional discourse in which the narrative is shaped for its visitors.

Connecting this two-sided discourse to the representation of (national) identities, the concepts of the ‘Other’ and ‘subalternity’ become relevant. The concepts of the Other as formulated by Edward Said and the subaltern as formulated by Gayatri Spivak are essential in this analysis of exhibition practices. Both these concepts are used in the field of postcolonial and subaltern studies and are related, but not the same.1_{Said’s concepts of the Orient and the}

Other are understood as part of a discourse founded in academic knowledge which do not display ‘an “inert fact of nature,” but are rather understood as “an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other” (4-5). The Other can be seen as a construction in Western academic knowledge which is ostensibly suited to talk about non-Westerners but it is actually a construction to which the West can postulate itself rather than that it is said to display an essence of the non-Westerners (273). The concept of the Other has been employed in postcolonial studies to study imperial texts in relation to Western discourse which insert and maintain the West’s dominant

position.

The related concept of the subaltern is useful to construct insights into the power of representing. In the article “Can the Subaltern Speak,” Spivak explains the elements that

1 Subaltern studies were formed as a field in the 1970s. Gayatri Spivak as one of its leading scholars defines the field as one that offers an interdisciplinary, non-essentialist approach to historiography which focuses on “the bottom layer of society, not necessarily put together by capital logic alone” (“The New Subaltern” 324).

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establish this category and complex notion. She based her definition of the critical concept of the ‘subaltern’ on the work of Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci who already

researched the place of the intellectual with regard to the subaltern and the dominant power hegemonies (283). The term subaltern was picked up by postcolonial and later subaltern studies where it is now explained as a category of the marginalized, subjugated and colonized outside of the dominant power hegemony. The emphasis of the category of the subaltern which distinguishes it from related concepts is found in its representation in Western intellectual discourse and academic knowledge. A subaltern position is created through the act of representing. Not through the representation itself but through the presentation of this discourse as being transparent. In doing so, it claims to be free from the economical and ideological implications of the agent who represents the marginalized subaltern. Spivak names Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in particular who “systematically ignore the question of ideology and their own implication in intellectual and economic history” (272). This means that the object represented is always also part of the implications of the one representing. Because this is ignored, a position of subalternity is created, meaning that not the voice of the subaltern is heard but its representation with which come the implications of the agent who represents is heard. Spivak finds fault with the fact that the recipient is not made aware of these implications. In the representation of identities, whether national identities or that of other cultures, the implication of the location of the museum and its institutionalized discourse is very relevant when looking critically at constructions of

representation because these can create a subaltern position or have the possibility to provide the public with critical insights into the workings of the power of representation.

The first exhibition that will be discussed in chapter one, The Citadel, exists largely of photographs made by Iranian photographer Kaveh Golestan of the women of Shahr-e No, the prostitute quarter of Teheran. The medium of representation, photography, gives the visitors the idea of a direct look into history, however, “photographs may ‘freeze’ their subjects, but they do not freeze time” (Crane “The Conundrum” 106). This means that although being a direct image from a specific real moment in time, the interpretation of such an image is subject to change. Thus, when remembering through photography, it is essential to look at the interpretation of the exhibition narrative, of this history in order to see whether the

representation of this part of history is constructive for the visitors.

In the second chapter the works of art and the museum are in a different dynamic. The objects of My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love are made for display in a museum or gallery. The exhibition contains works that are not a direct representation of

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people in history such as the photographs by Kaveh Golestan. Adversely, the artworks function as a symbolized, fantastical representation of these people. The construction of their symbolic representation provides a basis for insights into the power of representation and subalternity. This can be done by an analysis of the relation between the works of art and the museum as their presenter.

The third chapter is focused on the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Here, the

representation of a national identity by means cultural memory is done in a building where its architecture brings with it a decorative program steeped in Dutch 19th_{-century cultural}

nationalism. The decorative scheme of the building celebrates the Netherlands as a nation ruling over the ‘less civilized’ parts of the world. The objects are immerged into a specific, political and historical narrative which is an interference in the experience of the objects. Essential, then, is not the representation of power and subalternity in the objects but rather the way in which the museum deals with historical objects as well as the building’s decorative program in relation this narrative of national identity.

This thesis is an enquiry into the representation of people in the different historical narratives of the three museums. It will relate Spivak’s insights into the constructions

subalternity and the power of representing to the dynamic of museum, object and visitor with the help of Mieke Bal’s analysis of the museum and their exhibition narratives. What comes into question is how representations of historic Others are used in the creation of these exhibitions and whether these are useful and constructive with regard to subalternity. The exhibitions that will be discussed each deal with the notions of remembrance and cultural memory in a different manner. They will shed light on what can be considered as positive interferences and what can be considered as negative interferences that affect the public’s experience of the objects. The play of looking and speaking by the visitor, museum and its objects are central in this analysis.

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Chapter 1

Kaveh Golestan’s The Citadel Foam, Amsterdam 21 March – 4 May 2014

The exhibition The Citadel in the photography museum in Amsterdam (Foam) puts on display a set of 45 photographs taken by the Iranian documentary photographer Kaveh Golestan. The exhibition booklet states Golestan’s photographs have “hugely influenced the work of future generations of Iranian artists but has remained seriously over-looked in Europe” (Knoppers). The exhibition shows photos taken by Golestan between 1975 and 1977 of the women living and working in the citadel of Shahr-e No in Tehran, Iran. The

information given at the exhibition by means wall texts explain that Shahr-e No was the red light district of the city inhabited by only women and where the gates to the citadel only allowed men to visit. After the Iranian revolution in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the destruction of this district during which some of the women died during the fires and others were executed a year after the destruction. Not only by means of these photos are the visitors of the exhibition made aware of this particular time and place in Iranian history, but the photos are also accompanied by other historical material from this period such as newspaper clippings and photos. The setup of the exhibition also provides the visitor with a timeline containing contextual information surrounding the relevant historical events. All these different elements of this exhibition exposition convey together a cultural memory of a forgotten part of history.

To enter the two exhibition spaces, the visitor has to walk through a long hallway leading up to the entrance of the exhibition rooms. The sides of these hallways present the public with the timeline of historical events. It gives an overview of the history of Shahr-e No with as focal points Golestan’s time in the citadel making the photos, its destruction and the current function of the area as a park with a lake. Passing the hall and the timeline, the visitor can enter the first of the two exhibition rooms containing the photos and the other historical material as well as the passage into the second exhibition room. The two rooms are small, intimate spaces where the photos hang side by side at eye level, complemented by

information texts on the wall and other historical and cultural material in display cases. Although this additional material is displayed and Golestan’s photos are only small objects, these are definitely the centerpieces of the exhibition; they take up most of the space on the walls. Because these photos hang on eye-level they attract the visitor’s first attention when entering the room.

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All these different elements together form the exhibition narrative. In her book

Double Exposures Mieke Bal describes how an exhibition narrative consists of two sides. An

exhibition narrative, Bal writes, is a “filler” which fills in the discrepancy between the individual object and what it comes to stand for in the exhibition: “the very fact of exposing the object – presenting it while informing about it – impels the subject to connect the

‘present’ of the objects to the ‘past’ of their making, functioning, and meaning.” On another level the narrative “is the necessarily sequential nature of the visit” (4). As the first element of this exhibition the visitors encounter in the exhibition space is the timeline, the dominant narrative of this exhibition is a historical narrative displayed by means of the objects. The dominance of this ‘filler’ of historical and cultural memory is retained throughout the entire setup of the exhibition through the inclusion different historical objects. But not only the objects in this exhibition are set into place for this exhibition narrative, also the entire exhibition is set into place as part of a bigger narrative on Iranian history.

The Citadel is part of a more extensive project which intention is to bring back the

cultural memory of this historical period of Iranian history. In an interview with the guest curator of this exhibition, Vali Mahlouji, he explains that this exhibition is part of his project called Archeology of the Final Decade:

This large project investigates the artistic milieu and intellectual conditions of the final decade before the fall of the Shah in 1979 – the pre-revolutionary moment – in Iran. The project re-circulates and reincorporates historical and cultural material – destroyed, banned or under-represented, yet historically significant – back into cultural memory and discourse. (Knoppers)

The photos from The Citadel are thus part of a bigger project which aims at drawing people’s attention to this material and its context.2_{Mahlouji states that he wants to bring these objects}

“back into cultural memory and discourse” but what can be questioned is whether an

exhibition held in a country where this material has never been part of the cultural memory to begin with, can actually cater to this bigger ambition of the exhibition and the project.

2 Other projects part of the Archaeology of the Final Decade are the exhibition Unedited History (Iran

1960-2014) at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in May 2014 and at the National Museum of XXI Century Arts

in Rome in December 2014. The project also consists of publications in newspapers and magazines as well as lectures and universities and relevant societies (Mahlouji).

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Exhibition Aims

To see how the photos function as a bearer of cultural meaning relevant for the visitors, the object’s place and function in the exhibition narrative needs to be unraveled. Bal describes the dynamic between museum, object and visitor where the visitor is presented by a narrative which the museum creates by means of the artworks (Double Exposures 4). The objects are specifically set into place to represent an overarching idea or meaning: “the object is there to substantiate the statement” (3). This dynamic seems to be applicable to the exhibition at Foam: the objects, the pictures of the women of Shahr-e No and the other historical objects are put into place by the museum and the curator in order to create a narrative which is meant to convey a memory of a historical period in time and a cultural memory.

Vali Mahlouji stated in the interview with Foam curator Kim Knoppers that the first aim of this exhibition was to make these photos “part of the history of photography”

(Knoppers). The pictures are showcased for the first time since 1978 as a complete set again. This is done in the institutionalized environment of the museum, a place which aids the recognition of their cultural relevance. This seems to be a good start to achieve Mahlouji’s goal: exhibition overviews are compiled, exhibition booklets are printed and the public is made aware of their exposition by means of advertisements. This provides the photos with a place within the museum’s history as well as everyone memory who encounters them. A second aim for the exposition of these photos according to Mahlouji was to “reveal a part of Iranian society that many people are unaware of. It gives a face to women who were

structurally and socially marginalized” (Knoppers). This aim can be divided into two separate aims; remembering or bringing awareness to a forgotten part of Iranian history and to

represent the women living in this period and making them part of this awareness.

The exhibition’s aim of remembering is what also connects it to the larger project of Mahlouji; to include and spread historical material which was excluded from the cultural memory of this time because of the censorship implemented after the Iranian revolution in 1979. Thus, the photos which could not be viewed for a long period of time because of this censorship are put on display again. Also, next to Golestan’s photos, the timeline, other banned material and information texts are included in the exhibition to strengthen a historical reading of these photos. Especially the overview of the events surrounding Golestan’s

pictures of Shahr-e No provide a historical context for the visitors which makes the narrative of the exhibition accessible for every visitor despite previous knowledge of this part of Iranian history. Examples of sources that give historical context to the photos are the texts from Golestan’s personal notebooks. These texts provide the visitors an access into the

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photographer’s direct experience with the women of Shahr-e No and a reconstruction of his thoughts on this part of Iranian history.

Other informational sources for the visitors are the texts on the walls. Reading through these texts, an emphasis on the cultural and historical significance of the photos can be noted. Two examples of pieces of text which accompany the exhibition:

Golestan situates his documentary practice within wider social and political urgencies. In his notebooks he discusses a range of topics including the role of art in society, censorship, exploitation, labor laws, and migrations from rural to urban centers. Exposure of the photographs receives public and media attention. When Golestan exhibits his photographs at an exhibition entitled Three Reports: Prostitute, Worker,

Asylum at Tehran University, an unprecedented number of visitors turn up. It is also

widely covered in the media.

Both of these fragments from the text on the walls of the exposition space do not talk about the aesthetical or technical qualities of the photos but these texts explain how the social context Golestan worked in, influenced his works of art and also how his works of art were perceived within this social context. Emphasis is put on historical and cultural context rather than on the individual objects. This is strengthened through the presentation of the photos as a series on the captions next to the pictures in contrast to presenting them as singular photos: “untitled (Prostitute series, 1975-77).” It can therefore be said that when focusing on the captions, together with a quick glance through the exhibition the visitor will learn something about this part of Iranian history. Consequently, this will bring awareness to the context of the photos wherefore the exhibition succeeds in providing its visitors, by means of all its elements, with a narrative that conveys cultural knowledge which Mahlouji considered as being central to this exhibition.

Another contextual component the exhibition emphasizes apart from the social context is that of the maker of the photos. Mahlouji explains that Kaveh Golestan

“documented many […] major historical events after the conflict in Northern Ireland, such as the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, and the Gulf Wars” and he characterizes the

photographer as someone who takes “a deeply humanistic” approach to his work (Knoppers). This characterization portrays Golestan not specifically as an Iranian photographer but as an artist whose work bears international relevance. It can be connected to the first initiative of this exhibition as mentioned by Mahlouji, namely to make these worldly photos a “part of the

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history of photography.” This history of photography is framed as a universal history, not bound to location or time and therefore can these photos be seen culturally significant in every part of the world.

Constructing the Exhibition

The third goal of the exhibition mentioned by Mahlouji is to bring back a “face to women who were structurally and socially marginalized” by means of putting their portraits on display. This goal is to be achieved directly through the main objects of the exhibition; the photos of the women in Shahr-e No. Through defining the women as “structurally and socially marginalized” they are put in a position of oppressed Other. Because of this position, an issue for further consideration is if the visitors can actually ‘know’ these women through the way in which they are presented and then whether such a representation can be seen as constructive. With Spivak’s article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in mind, it can be questioned whether this representation of women creates a constructive platform where they have the ability to speak or that these photos only function as a sign to portray a bigger narrative which exposes the discrepancy between object and its intended meaning within the exhibition narrative as Bal has suggested.

Bal describes the dynamic of museum, object and visitor as a narrative between the three components: “in expositions a ‘first person,’ the exposer, tells a ‘second person,’ the visitor, about a ‘third person,’ the object on display.” In this dynamic “the ‘first person’ remains invisible,” this means that the visitor is not aware that the exposer is narrating the story of the objects rather than the objects narrating their own story. The objects are silent because they have become the sign for exposer’s narrative: “the thing on display comes to stand for something else, the statement about it. It comes to mean. The thing recedes into invisibly as its sign status takes precedence to make the statement”. This problematizes the autonomy of the object, meaning that the ability of the visitor to see the object on its own rather than what it has come to mean in the narrative of exposing it is altered: “the object is there to substantiate the statement” (Double Exposures 3-4). This discrepancy between object and statement is a space which needs to be ‘filled in’ at the hand of the elements such as the wall texts, timeline and biographical information on the artist found next to the photos portraying the women of Shahr-e No. All these elements together create the representation of these women Mahlouji opts for. But as the exhibition narrative alters the way in which the objects are perceived. It can be challenged that these women can be seen in any way different than the historical narrative of the exhibition.

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Spivak’s critique of representing the subaltern is specifically aimed at academic knowledge and Western intellectuals who “systematically ignore the question of ideology and their own implications in intellectual and economic history” when representing the Other (272). The museum cannot be directly doubled with academic knowledge and Western intellectuals but relating Spivak’s theory to the art world, the museum is constituted within the larger institution of art where definitions of what art is and especially what cannot be art, are produced. With this, the art world forms their niche within the larger intellectual

discourse Spivak theorizes on. The museum can be seen as representative of the highly institutionalized and politicized discourse of the art world which claims transparency but, as said by Bal, its implication in the narrative remains invisible.

An essential element of a subaltern position is that it resists symbolization: “the subaltern presents itself to academic knowledge as something like Jacques Lacan’s category of the Real: that which resists symbolization, a gap-in-knowledge that subverts or defeats the presumption to ‘know’ it (Beverly 2). Presenting objects within a museum, an extra layer of interpretation is added by means of the exhibition narrative. For the direct representations of the women of Shahr-e No by means of their photographs, the content cannot be known because the photos have become presenters of the social position of the women in the larger narrative of this part of Iranian history which has created their subalternity. As follows, the women in the photos are not to be considered as subaltern because of their “structurally and socially marginalized position” in history but they are to be considered as subaltern because of their representation as such within the exhibition narrative.

It can be said that what makes these women specifically subaltern in their

representation is that they have become part of a narrative that caters to an audience that not necessarily has a previously existing, shared cultural memory of the events surrounding Shahr-e No or these photos. Looking at these photos without any knowledge of their historical significance, the viewer would be allowed to see the photos as individual objects. However, the setup of the exhibition does not allow for such an approach to the photos because the first elements of the exposition the visitor encounters are the historical overview and the informative texts which focus on social context. The visitor is therefore immediately triggered to read the photographed women in their historical and social context provided by the exhibition narrative instead of first taking in the individual qualities of the photos.

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Play of Looking

The public is therefore presented with a static image created by exhibition narrative without being made aware of this. This is problematic because such images are perceived as

“constative: informative and affirmative,” according the Bal, “the discourse has a truth value: the proposition it conveys is either true or false” (3). The visitor is not invited to think of these women as other than the social history that they index because of the descriptiveness of the exhibition narrative; the women’s subaltern position is reinforced which silences the women, it has given them a face, but one voice speaks for these women rather than that they have individual voices to speak with.

However, the strength of the photos as works of art mitigates this conclusion. Foam is a museum initially concerned with photography rather than with providing an educational version of history.3_{A visitor interested in the art of photography who is primarily concerned}

with the individual photos rather than the overall message of the exhibition narrative, is drawn into the photos by the direct gaze of the women in the photos. In the intimate exposition space, a new dynamic is created, that of visitor and the women in the photo.

Fig. 1 Kaveh Golestan Prostitute Series, 1975 – 77.

As can be seen from these three photos that are part of the exhibition in Foam, the center of attention in these portraits is the gaze of the women, their play of looking or deliberately not looking. The photographs are constructed in a manner that the eyes of the women are the middle point of the photographs. In the book Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes points out an

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The museum centralizes the art of photography in its exhibitions; the general information in the press kit on

FOAM’s website states that it is a museum which “enables people all over the world to experience and enjoy photography” (“General Info Foam”).

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essential element of the medium of photography: “it has been here, and yet immediately separated; it has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred” (77). The gaze of the women has irrefutably been present in a moment of history but is also already

immediately over. Still, through the photo the onlooker becomes a part of this moment in time; he forms a direct link with the photo and therefore also with the women:

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed. (80-1)

Barthes poetically illustrates the very direct link of a person photographed, the photo and the onlooker, a relation almost physical in nature. Looking at these women of Shahr-e No, the viewer and the photo are in an exchange that is not interfered by the exhibition narrative. Mahlouji praised the Golestan’s humanistic approach to photography: “Kaveh’s view is very human, but avoids pity” (Knoppers). By means of the direct relation created through the play of looking by the women, the women are allowed to show their individual circumstances without asking the visitor to pity them. In this dynamic, the construction of the representation of these women in a position of an oppressed Other is avoided because the interference of the exhibition narrative is taken out of the equitation.

Although Foam’s initial objective is to present its visitors with the historical as well as contemporary highlights of photography, the exhibition The Citadel presents a strong

historical and contextual narrative which effaces the women’s individual characteristics in the photos. These photos are made attractive for the visitors of the museum by means of the attention to the artist and his international relevance in the information texts but also in the way the visitors are presented with an informative and affirmative narrative which effectively conveys a part of Iranian history. As a result, the ‘reader’ of this exhibition is not invited to understand this history and the women positioned to represent it as a history of individual people but the objects are put together to construct this overarching narrative. Because of this production of meaning which connects and overshadows the different singular objects, the subaltern position of the women in the photos is reproduced: they are not presented as individuals with separate histories but they together have come to stand for their social

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position. This has given them a face, but, in terms of Spivak, not a voice. A visitor to this exhibition can however make a direct connection to the women because of the strength of their gaze through the play of looking at photographs as described by Barthes maybe

momentarily forgetting what they have come to represent because they do not ask for pity for their social circumstances.

This particular exposition revolves around pictures which deal with a documentary-style representation of women and their historical relevance. The next chapter will deal with an exhibition which does not revolve around a documentary-style representation of historical characters; it deals with an overturned version of a part of history rather than showing

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Chapter 2

Kara Walker’s My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love Walker Art Center, Minnesota 2007

The exhibition in the previous chapter created a cultural memory through the presence of an exhibition narrative involving the photographs by Kaveh Golestan. In this chapter the artworks by contemporary American artist Kara Walker are central in an analysis of representations of the subaltern in a historical narrative. Walker’s exhibition My

Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love was first put on display at the Walker Art

Center in Minnesota in February 2007. It gives an overview of her work that mainly draws on the historical narrative of colonialism and slavery in the pre-Civil War Era in 18th_-century

America. After being shown for four months in Minnesota, the exhibition travelled to various other museums in the United States as well as in Paris, France.

The white walls such as those of the Walker Art Center in Minnesota immediately invite the visitor to direct his attention towards the works of art rather than the space they inhabit. The cleanness of these walls smooth out intruding forces from the world outside of the exhibition hall and outside of the artwork. Yet this is only an illusory cleanliness: in fact, showcasing works of art on these walls means embedding them within the institutionalized discourse of the art world. The white walls function to erase the outside world and cover up the artwork’s place within this discourse. This results in an experience of a work of art as autonomous object completely separated from its showcasing environment. Such an view of an artwork in an exhibition has been contested, for example done by O’Doherty in his description of the white cube illustrating that:

Hanging, indeed, is what we need to know more about. From Courbet on, conventions of hanging are an unrecovered history. The way pictures are hung makes assumption about what is offered. Hanging editorializes on matters of interpretation and value, and is unconsciously influenced by taste and fashion. (24)

Works of art are hung in a museum in a specific way in order to present the visitor with the best experience possible. But this practice means that the experience is one that is constructed through interferences as seemingly inconsequential as the order in which they are hung and can the artworks not be seen as separated from their environment. A work of art is highly

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dependent upon its place within a museum in order attract visitors, to be looked at in a certain way by the public and to be considered as high art.

The walls of the eight different exhibition spaces on which the characters of Walker’s art in the Walker Art Center in Minnesota are displayed, are as white as the ones described by Brian O’Doherty in the introduction of this thesis. The visitor can take an audio tour or read the narratives in the gallery guide the museum provides to take them on a chronological tour of the artworks, starting with Walker’s earliest works. Apart from that is the public free to move through the different spaces.

Kara Walker’s exhibition presents a survey of different works of art from her career including works on paper, video installations and texts. The cut-out silhouettes Walker uses to portray her historical narrative are of course an entirely different medium than the

photographs by Golestan. The visual image created through using the silhouette form with all black paper creates a simplification of racial representation. All characters are of one color; black. But this at the same time complicates racial representation because it draws attention to the stereotypical features Walker uses to give these cut-outs their identity: “for Walker, using the silhouette come from, in part, her thinking about what it means for groups of people to define themselves through images. This is a personal interest of the artist, who says that making artwork about race translates into intimate issues about identity” (“Representing Race”). The medium of cut-out silhouettes allows for a symbolic representation of identity, rather than a direct experience of the artworks such as the photographs of Golestan provide. It can be said that the symbolizations are shadows of the past, not direct shadows of a historical marginalized group, but of all the racial representations and issues of representing their identity.

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Fig. 2 Installation view of Kara Walker’s My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My

Love at the Walker Art Center Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2007.

The histories thematic in Walker’s work are those of the people of pre-Civil War America who are displayed in, what Judith Halberstam has described as “a puppet show version of the sexual life of slavery” (136). This is a controversial approach to such a subject and it is thus understandable that her work is said to give voice to “the underbelly of

America’s racial and gender tensions” (“Biography”). In dealing with and representing such issues, Walker’s work becomes part of the postcolonial discourse in relation to the subaltern which Spivak criticizes. Spivak’s critique is especially relevant here because Walker’s work is highly dependent upon its place within the museum, firstly to be recognized as art as such and secondly because the big black cut-out silhouettes which constitute a large part of the exhibition stand in strong contrast with the walls of the museum and the discourse they represent.

With the white walls as the representative of a museum’s transparency is not meant that a museum denies its public function for its visitors to present and educate them on what is considered high art or that it wields power over these conventions in the art world. This ostensible transparency of the exhibition narrative means that the public is presented with a narrative that claims to be able to show intrinsic values of the object on display. As explained by Mieke Bal already, the different elements which together make up the exhibition narrative interfere with the visitor and his direct aesthetical experience of the object. In other words, the viewer is led to believe that the artworks are always able to speak in a museum but it is actually the exhibition that speaks. This transparency breaks down when bringing Spivak’s theory to artworks which compromise a representation of the Western’s Other.

Spivak critiques Western intellectuals who deny their own “geo-political

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(271-2). Spivak names Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze specifically as objects of her critique: “neither Deleuze nor Foucault seems aware that the intellectual within socialized capital, brandishing concrete experience, can help consolidate the international division of labor” (275). In other words, Spivak argues that these scholars are not aware of their position in the “brandishing” or creation of our perception of the Other, even in scholarly work. Although Spivak mentions only two scholars here, the article deals with the whole of Western

intellectual discourse surrounding the field of postcolonial critique which allows for a broader approach and application of her theory.

Regarding museums as part of a Western intellectual discourse, the transparency of the white walls can be challenged because the “geo-political determination” of the museum is unattended to. This means that showcasing works which deal with a representation of a Western’s Other on these ostensible transparent walls, this would result in a creation of a subaltern position and a silencing of the people represented by means of the symbolization in Walker’s art world. Spivak’s argument suggests that no critical and functional representation of the subaltern is possible in a museum when presented with such transparency. However, this is not necessarily the case if one looks at works of art which engage the white walls in its representation of the Other in order to prevent the walls and their discourse from fading into the background of the museum.

Walker’s work shows a version of the enslaved and the enslavers and their life on a plantation but essential for their representation is that they are not represented in their

traditional roles of victim and oppressor but Walker uses the paper silhouettes in 18th_-century

fashion to portray these characters as all active in themes of violence, sexuality and subjection (“Biography”). The visitors are provided with a gallery guide that provides a narrative with each of eight exhibition halls. These narratives give information on for example the aesthetical qualities of the artworks, biographical information of the artist and her own explanations of the artworks. This exhibition then seems to be related to The Citadel in the sense that they both provide a historical narrative next to the works of art. Walker’s exhibition however is concerned with a symbolic and fantastical representation of a part of history where the photos by Golestan provide direct access to the represented figures. Because this exhibition narrative on a part of history is to a great extent different from the exhibition The Citadel it can be questioned whether through their symbolization, Walker’s artworks give the historical Other a position to speak whereby placing themselves in the midst of the discourse on the subaltern representation within historical narratives.

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Oppositions and You Do

In the exhibition of The Citadel the exhibition narrative seemed to be of more importance than the actual artworks. This is different in My Complement where the display of a survey of Walker’s works is the focal point. The focus of this analysis of the exhibition in relation to subaltern representation will therefore be on separate artworks and their relation to the museum rather than an analysis of the exhibition narrative as done with The Citadel. An example of one of Walker’s cut-out silhouettes from the exhibition is the artwork You Do from 1993/4. This work is a Rorschach cut-out but with slight but essential differences between the two sides. It shows an Afro-American girl on the left who holds a puppet in her hands and her the girl on the right holds a small male figure in her hands. In the lower left corner, a small male figure can be seen. He wears a hat and a walking stick which he points up at the much bigger girl. The two small figures can be identified as white males of high standing.

This last identification of these figures as white and Afro-American seems to be fairly subjective at first, seeing that all of these figures are made out of the same black paper. Nonetheless, the world presented through the artworks encompass stereotypical features such as the full lips of the girls and the typical hats of the tiny men which legitimizes and even invite the viewer to identify the cut-outs as Afro-American and white males of higher

standing. The use of these stereotypical features does not frame the exposition as an accurate historical narrative as was done in The Citadel but the viewer is presented with a exaggerated symbolic historical narrative which correspondingly also serves a different function than the Foam exhibition.

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Fig. 3 Kara Walker. You Do. 1993/1994.

Next to the stereotypical features, another essential component of this artwork, which applies most of the works in the exhibition, is the use of the opposition of black and white. The artworks use the whiteness of the walls to oppose and increase the intensity of the blackness of the cut-out silhouettes. This is one of the visual elements of the artwork that turns the white walls into part of the artwork rather than just the construction to display them on. The implementation of the walls within the artworks would mean that the works do not

allow the museum and its discourse a silent position but the artworks stand in dialogue with this discourse and, consequently, can have something to say on their representation Still, there are different ways in which their voice can be heard. As the works present a strong binary opposition of color to the museum’s walls, suggested is a critique on the whiteness of these walls and as a result to Western intellectual discourse.

Not only the opposition of black and white can be read as an opposition to traditional Western discourse but also the use of subversion hints to such a reading. As already

mentioned, the exhibition shows an overturned world of pre-Civil War America, observable in the narrative of the overall exhibition as well in a close-reading of the objects. Through a denial of traditional power relations this subversion becomes apparent. The cut-out You Do serves again as a good example where an inversion of big and small is seen. When

representing the suppressed and its oppressor of this part of history, by means of the opposition of big and small, one would expect an image of the enslaver towering over the girl. In You Do however, this is not the case, these proportions are reversed. The girl is to a

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great extent bigger than the man next to her and the tiny human she is holding in her hands. As bigger size can be seen as a visual convention of the representation of power, the

inversion of the expected image calls these power relations into question: due to the size of the girl in comparison to the man she seems more in control of her situation.

This inverted power relation is strengthened by the fact that the girl holds a puppet on the left and the girl on the right holds a man in the same manner. In this way the artwork equals the man with the puppet. Because a puppet is an object which is almost always controlled by others, here too, the image suggests that the girl is in control of both the man and puppet. This is one of the examples in the works of Walker with an expression of power relations. Halberstam draws attention to this play of power in the whole of the exhibition: “by maintaining a constant tension between the elements of the work, the collage asks us to consider the full range of our experience of power – both productive power, power for, but also negative power, or power to unbecome” (136). The artworks then, do not seem to take a specific stance in the representation of power, its different forms circulate between the different characters.

Returning to Spivak’s article and the question whether Walker’s art has the possibility to speak with regard to the discourse on representing the subaltern, it seems that looking at Walker’s nonconventional portrayal of these characters by means of an inversion of power relations and a foregrounding of oppositions does not immediately provide for a constructive addition to the dialogue on power and representations. The simple inversion of power

relations as an insurgency of the object towards traditional conventions of power

representations does not lead to a critical questioning of the practice of representing. They will keep this ideological construction in place according to Spivak:

Within the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject, the track of sexual difference is doubly effaced. The question is not of female participation in insurgency, or the ground rules of the sexual division of labor, for both of which there is ‘evidence.’ It is rather, that, both as object of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant. (287)

This construction of power relations is kept in place because the suppressor is still defined by the suppressed and the suppressed is still defined by the suppressor. In the description of You

Do such a practice becomes apparent because the characters are defined by their relation;

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method that would prevent it from using such a ruse. For the ‘figure’ of women, the

relationship between woman and silence can be plotted by women themselves; race and class differences are subsumed under that charge” (287). In other words, in order for the subaltern to define itself, it should find its figure within him or herself rather than in its opposite.

So far, the reading of this object focused on the reversion of the conventional

representation of power. However, this does not yet break down the “ideological construction of gender,” noted by Spivak because the man remains the dominant body by which the girl is defined. The works by Walker are however not only a medium for the artist to present its viewers with strong oppositions. Reversal of power relations is only the first layer of

oppositions. This idea will be discussed in the third section. The following section will look at what is considered in postcolonial critique and subaltern studies as useful and critical within the discourse on the subaltern.

Responding to Representing

In his book Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory John Beverly explains what the impossibilities surrounding representations of the subaltern in academic knowledge are according to Spivak:

The subaltern is subaltern in part because it cannot be represented adequately by academic knowledge (and “theory”). It cannot be represented adequately by academic knowledge because academic knowledge is a practice that actively produces

subalternity (it produces subalternity in the act of representing it). How can one claim to represent the subaltern from the standpoint of academic knowledge, then, when that knowledge is itself involved in the ‘othering’ of the subaltern? (2)

What Beverly points out here is Spivak’s conclusion of her article: the impossibility of representing the subaltern in academic knowledge precisely because it produces subalternity. Thus, at first sight, it seems for the artworks by Walker and other works which deal with a similar theme, that these works create subalternity rather than critically representing it within the space of the museum and its highly institutionalized and politicized discourse.

Yet it has to be mentioned here that Walker’s art does not directly stem from

academic theory and knowledge as the work from Foucault and Deleuze would for example. The dynamic of museum, artist and artwork allows for a separation between author and presenter which is not present between authors of academic articles. There is a difference in

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Walker as author of the work and the museum as presenter of the work. Still, because it is represented on the walls of a museum the works cannot be seen as separate of the academic knowledge of the space which the works depend upon. Walker’s work is similarly part of an institution as Foucault’s and Deleuze’s work is. With the help of Spivak, the workings of this institution in the creation of subalternity can be looked at critically.

Both Beverly and Spivak point out which elements in a representation of the subaltern provide for it to be a critically relevant representation. Beverly explains that his book “argues that what subaltern studies can or should represent is not so much the subaltern as a concrete social-historical subject, but rather the difficulty of representing the subaltern as such in our disciplinary discourse and practice within the academy” (1). Spivak makes similar claim in her article: “what I find useful is the sustained and developing work on the mechanics of the constitution of the Other; we can use it to much greater analytic and interventionist advantage than invocations of the authenticity of the Other” (294). What both scholars convey here is that when representing the Other one has to move away from an accurate portrayal of history and direct the attention towards how the representation is constructed to prevent the Other from moving into subalternity. This is one of the possibilities to construct a critical

representation of the Other. In the case of representing a work in a museum, the white walls will not immediately draw attention to the “mechanics of the constitution of the Other” in an artwork but the artwork itself will have to draw attention to this by means of a symbolic narrative. This manner of representation is what differentiates this exhibition from for example the exhibition of Kaveh Golestan’s photographs.

The artwork Cut from 1998 shows a woman with her hands above her head holding a shaving knife. Her wrists are cut, portrayed by a gap between the hands and the arms from which blood is spraying. Also part of her dress is cut. The gaps of white have become the way in which this woman is violated and cut. As she is holding the knife herself, it is not only a portrayal of violence, but more particularly of mutilation. This symbolization of self-mutilation serves a different function than the photographs by Kaveh Golestan. His portraits of the women of Shahr-e No offered a direct insight into their situation, and, being a

photograph, into moment in history. Walker’s artworks are not direct representations of women who have lived in a moment in history; the artworks rather symbolize the violence associated with symbolizations of this part of history.

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Fig. 4 Kara Walker. Cut. 1998

The use of controversial themes such as violence and self-mutilation, sexuality and

subjection, triggered strong responses from the visitors of the exhibition and people in the art world. This must not have been new for Walker, when she entered the art world her work was awarded and recognized but not accepted by everyone:

In 1997, the young African American artist Kara Walker won a MacArthur

Foundation grant for her intricate black paper silhouettes. But the reaction of many in the African American art community was far from congratulatory: Walker's use of racially charged imagery -- often in violent and sexual contexts -- provoked a maelstrom of controversy. (Sanneh 45)

This divergence in reception from different corners of the art world might exactly be why Walker’s art opened up the dialogue surrounding representations of the subaltern within the art world.

Halberstam, too, draws attention to some of the negative responses to Walker’s works of art: “from the horrified responses to her work (charges mainly of creating a new archive of racist imagery), many of which are pulled into her textual collages, Walker draws out the anxieties that she also represents” (137). Thus, one of the critiques on Walker’s exhibition is the representation of Afro-American people as stereotypical figures engaged in controversial scenes that are strongly associated with racism. However, the critique on these figures unveils the effectiveness of such a stereotypical representation of the Other. It seems that Walker’s

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works of art function as objects that intend to trigger their viewer to responses on the

representation of the subaltern by using imagery pertaining to racism, rather than claiming to be an historical accurate representation of the Other as a marginalized social group. This symbolic representation is exactly what Spivak and Beverly have indicated as useful within the discourse of post colonialism and subalternity.

What seems to be at stake is Spivak’s conclusion of her article: “the subaltern cannot speak” (308). This is a conclusion given with a sense of finality which would render any presentation of the Other irrelevant because, as Beverly said, it creates subalternity. A

consequence of constituting the subaltern in academic work is that it becomes something that resist symbolization and something that cannot be known and can therefore not be properly portrayed. However, it is precisely so that the characters in Walker’s work gives such a nonconventional symbolization that the focus is turned towards the construction of

symbolization and portrayal within the world of the museum seen by the different responses on her work.

Power, Shadow Feminism and A Work on Progress

John Beverly starts his book on subaltern studies with the connection of subalternity,

representation and power: “subaltern studies is about power, who has it and who doesn’t, who is gaining it and who is losing it. Power is related to representation: which representations have cognitive authority or can secure hegemony, which do not have authority or are not hegemonic” (1). The role of power is also very much present in Walker’s works; next to the themes of sexual desire and racism, the artworks encompass different relations with regard to power:

Kara Walker’s work is layered with images that reference history, literature, culture, and the darker aspects of human behavior. Connecting all of her work is an

examination of power. The characters in her environments display power struggles of all kinds: physical, emotional, personal, racial, sexual, and historical.

(“Introduction to the Themes”)

The oppositions and insurgencies displayed by the cut-out silhouettes are actions which require something to act against but also a certain means of power. As such acts require power, in order to go beyond a reading of Walker’s work as pure opposition, it is essential to look into instants where the characters do not act or display power but rather where they

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refuse to act and negate their power. Taking the role of power in representing the subaltern into account as mentioned by Beverly, a refusal of power might lead to a refusal of a subaltern position because no authority or secure hegemony can be established through the representation.

The refusal of power relates to Halberstam’s article which “explore[s] a feminist politics that issues not from a doing but from an undoing, not from a being or becoming but from a refusal to be or become woman as she has been defined and imagined with Western philosophy” (124). The undoing and unbecoming of women, which she coins ‘shadow feminism,’ is useful when looking at the characters in Walker’s exhibition as not only in a position of opposition. Shadow feminism is a concept which centralizes negation of power by women which is explained as following:

This feminism, a feminism grounded in negation, refusal, passivity, absence, and silence, offers spaces and modes of unknowing, failing, and forgetting as part of an alternative feminist project, a shadow feminism which has nestled in more positivist accounts and unraveled their logics from within. (Halberstam 124)

In other words, shadow feminism does not take place in its opposition against, for example, male dominance but it can be found in passivity and refusal to oppose or act. This allows for a search for femininity from within rather than finding it in its opposite.

Halberstam discusses the idea of shadow feminism and contextualizes this notion by means of examples from the art world. One of her examples is Kara Walker’s exhibition where she finds expressions of power in the central themes of sexuality, subjection and sadomasochism. According to Halberstam, the Afro-American women in Walker’s work refuse to take a role as women who are taken advantage of by white men. But more

importantly, the characters are shown as refusing to take a side with regard to their subaltern positions (137).

This can be seen at work in the cut-out: A Work on Progress from 1998. This work portrays two women. Both women are presumably Afro-American as can again be deduced by the stereotypical details in the imagery. The woman on the left has chains around her wrists and seems to be falling down as she is hanging vertically and has her hands in the air. The woman on the right carries a broom with which she seems to sweep away the woman on the left and cause her to fall down. Also this work by Walker, as seen before, does not present a traditional representation of the historical narrative of pre-Civil War America. In this work

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of art, the women take up both the role as the suppressed, represented by the woman on the left and her chains and the suppressor; the woman on the right who sweeps the other woman away with her broom. This artwork shows both a woman in control and a woman who is controlled by someone else. The power relation is in this work of art not expressed through a white man dominating an Afro-American woman. The power has been transferred to these women and now circulates between them. This can be brought back to Spivak’s idea where when the oppressor is taken out of the equation when representing power, ideological constructions of power are deconstructed (287).

Fig. 5 Kara Walker. A Work on Progress. 1998.

The affirmative and informative characterization of an exhibition by Mieke Bal does not seem to hold when looking at these artworks. The works A Work on Progress and Cut both implement women in acts of violence, towards themselves as well as towards other women, taking up the role of victim as well as violator; the women’s bodies and acts have become grounds for symbolized violence. In the dynamic between these works of art and these visitors, the visitors are not affirmed or informed in their expectations of this part of history because of the exaggerated stereotypical features of the characters and controversial themes in the exhibition. This is an element of the artwork that was not seen in the Kaveh Golestan exhibition. This forces the visitors to think about these representations as well as their own expectations of representations of this part of history. This explains why Halberstam finds such artworks relevant with regard to the notion of shadow feminism and the negation of power: “Walker draws out the anxieties that she also represents. Using art as bait and

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deploying the female body in particular as a site for the negative projection of racial and colonial fantasy” (137). By negating of a position of opposition and by becoming a site for violent imagery, uneasiness with certain representations the artwork’s viewer might have, are confronted and lead to discussions about representing, symbolization and subalternity in museums.

The negation of power is not only found in the imagery of the artworks but also in, for example, the title of the previously discussed work You Do. Although it is unclear who the ‘you’ or, in addition, the ‘I’ in this title refers to, the power of acting and doing is always refused and given to someone else. With this short piece of text, a narrative is created between the visitor and the artwork. Looking at the idea of an exhibition narrative as speech-act as Bal proposed, in this case, it is not the exposer, the exhibition narrative who speech-act as the “first person” who tells the “second person,” the viewer something about the objects as “third person,” but the title of the artwork directly addresses the viewer and tells it to do something (Double Exposures 3-4). This means that the artworks turns its direction towards the viewer and gives him the power of doing. The interferences of the exhibition narrative Bal mentions then do not come into play between this artwork and the viewer and the visitor. He is not affirmed or informed by an exhibition narrative but has to do this for himself. By the transferal of power from the artwork to the viewer the artwork draws in the spectator and draw out an action, possibly in the form of a response or deliberation about the symbolic representation.

The negation of power where the characters seem to refuse to take a stand with regard to their situation is where the power of Walker’s work resides according to Halberstam:

The title of one of her shows, ‘Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love,’ names the sadomasochistic terrain of speech and silence and makes clear that in a world engendered by sexual violence and its bastard offspring, a world where the enemy and the oppressor is also the lover, the victim is not choosing between action and passivity, freedom and death, but survival and desire. (137)

In Walker’s world, through different forms of negation the characters do not act in a world of conventional power relations of subjugator and subjugated, slave and slaver and black and white surrounding this theme. Thus, the victims in this exhibition therefore do not necessarily participate in insurgency against oppression of any kind or even take up the role of victim. This breaks down a reading of this object as a simple inversion of power relations which will

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not, as explained by Spivak, result in a critical assessments of representations of power. But the negation of power by the characters prevents that Walker’s exhibition ends up in the shadows of the academic discourse of the white walls of the museum because it draws out anxieties and responses from the visitors about a portrayal of the Other. Walker’s work can therefore be considered as a functional and critical representation of subalternity because this representation invites to visitors to reflect on the position of the Other, precisely because the works of art engage these walls in a symbolic representation of history.

Kara Walker’s exhibition shows a subverted world which is part of the discourse on the representation of the subaltern. It seems self-evident that the controversial themes such as sexual desire and racism which are combined in Walker’s exhibition are not material for a place in the shadows of the art world and draw out strong responses. Next to these themes, the strong visual opposition of the black cut-out characters acting in Walker’s subverted world with the white walls of the museum strengthen this impression.

Still, as explained by Spivak, the binary oppositions, taken in isolation, would uphold the traditional power relations of a narrative of slavery and are therefore not relevant for a critical discussion of subalternity. Nonetheless, looking closer at these silhouettes, the manner in which the art works deal with the at first sight binary oppositions of black and white but also of big and small, slave and enslaver and man and woman, seem to break down a reading where the artworks are a mere inversion of power relations which rely on binary oppositions.

Consequently, Walker’s figures are not represented as the marginalized figures one would expect in a narrative of slavery. Rather, the characters refuse to take a position of insurgency, do not choose one specific stance with regard to their disposition but alternatively negate their power. As a result, the characters are not presented in a manner which the

visitors will recognize as a traditional historical narrative of this era. This brought about strong responses to the work, either positive or negative and allows for a critical dialogue on representations of subalternity which can be considered as relevant according to Spivak and other postcolonial thinkers. The artworks themselves provide the positive interferences that active the public to think about representations of power.

In the next chapter, the objects of the exhibition, including objects which deal with a subaltern representation, again serve as presenters of a part of history. However, this

representation is different from the first two exhibition discussed so far because the objects are connected to a construction of national identity which can be seen as the underlying object of the museum.

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