Anna Szöke

The Chinese understanding of the term nature conceptually differs from the western, perception. Their imagination of nature roots in a continually changing and creative energy where the emphasis on the creation and on the generation lies. Consequently it consist form three creative forces: sky, earth and human. The human is considered not only as creature, but as a concept. This triggers through action and doing various phenomena. These phenomena could appear in a form of artistic craftsmanship, which are then a part of nature so might influence the versatile balance of cosmic happenings. Chinese landscape painting and the way it is conceived and implemented underwent significant changes during the 20th and 21st centuries. Cultural and political-historical processes of the 20th century in China generated and accelerated this process of change. Chinese artists confronted and examined the artistic and philosophic themes and theories of the western world. The Cultural Revolution impose...

This article will query the ethics of making and displaying photographs of human remains. In particular, we will focus on the role of photography in constituting human remains as specimens, and the centrality of the creation and circulation of photographic images to the work of physical anthropology and bioarchaeology. This work has increasingly become the object of ethical scrutiny, particularly in the context of a (post)colonial politics of recognition in which indigenous people seek to recover dominion over their looted material heritage, including the remains of their dead. This ethical concern extends to the question of how and under what circumstances we may display photographs of human remains. Moreover, this is not just a matter of whether and when we should or should not show photographs of the remains of the dead. It is a question of how these images are composed and produced. Our discussion of the ethics of the image is, therefore, indivisible from a consideration of the ...

Dead Images is a creative co-production of the TRACES project with the aim of facing the complex and contentious history, politics and ethics of collections of European human skull collections.
The Dead Images exhibition was created, not only to raise discussions on many levels – in public, within the scientific community, between museums practitioners and heritage communities - but also to try out new formats of engagement with the topic of human skull collections. The exhibition was planned as product and process at the same time (Butler/Lehrer 2016). A testing ground or, what the anthropologist George Marcus might describe as an experimental research site (Marcus 2010), to learn and understand together with the visitors how and whether we can (literally) face uncomfortable pasts. One of these engagement tools was the biographical tour - and the subsequent usage of biographies- during which fragments of the life and death stories of individuals whose skulls are held at the anthropological department of the Natural History Museum Vienna (NHM Vienna) were discussed. We were guided by the following research questions: How do visitors perceive human skulls? How does biographical and contextual information change the visitor experience?
Here I reflect on the conceptual and practical challenges of trying to trace the biographies of some individuals skulls kept at the NHM Vienna in order to create the biographical tours. In doing so, I will draw on my personal encounters with visitors during the tours to analyze this particular format.

Conference:
Decolonizing Museum Cultures and Collections:
Mapping Theory and Practice in East-Central Europe
International conference for heritage scholars and practitioners
October 21-24, 2020


Museums of Natural history, world cultures (formerly and sometimes still known as ethnographic museums), anatomical and medical museums hold bodily remains from ancient but also more recent history. They are traces of past lives and bear witness to the livings relationship to the dead but also to remaining structural unequal power relations. Departing from an ongoing long-term collaboration with colleagues from the Natural History Museum Vienna (NHM Vienna) and the research project TRACES 1 (Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts. From Intervention to Co-Production), this paper analyzes how the human story of these bodily traces, incites new ways of research methodologies based on interdisciplinary (artistic, ethnographic, historical,...) approaches, and can be opportunities for transmitting difficult (imperial / colonial) heritages. How can the collective but also personal engagement with collections of human remains evoke changes in present institutional structures, foster future collaborations and build new relationships? Can it contribute to deconstruct (neo)colonial systems that are lingering on? What are the ethical implications in engaging with these collections-Some individual's remains at the NHM Vienna were collected under violent and ethically questionable circumstances. To shed light on this collection's histories, the paper unravels how Viennese collectors of the 19 th and 20 th century were entangled in the networks of the Imperial (Mapping and categorizing the inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and Colonial Project (Collecting and classifying human crania from overseas). Stressing Vienna's function as a center of knowledge transfer with easy access to human corpses 2 between Eastern and Western Europe, the paper focuses on examples from a series of creative-reflexive public engagements with the NHM's human remains collection. By doing so, it discusses if and how the analyzed formats can contribute in building ethical-reflexive and decolonial futures.

Inventory Number 5015. The paper box with the handwritten inventory number lies in the front row of a long glass-faced cabinet in a hallway at the Natural History Museum Vienna. It sits in between thousands of human skulls, which are housed at the anthropology department of the museum. The box of Inv.Nr. 5015 is empty. A small note is placed inside the box, in place of the skull of the individual which is expected to rest there. It reads: "Im Panzerschrank" ("In the safe"). Who is the individual who is labeled "Inv. Nr. 5015", how did they become a part of this collection and why is he in the safe? This presentation explores the politics of a gift that was made 113 years ago to the emperor of Austria. It invites thinking through the moral and legal aspects of human remains as gifts. It tries to identify the ambivalence of the action itself, often between the two extremes of altruism and the superiority of the donor but also to question the "gift-giving" of human remains, emphasizing the debated tension of subject-object relationships.