ABSTRACT
The religious practice of West African Vodun – a term that describes both the religion itself and its protagonists in the form of spirits and powerful, multifunctional objects – is characterized by formal-aesthetic, content-related and material syntheses and accumulations. Processes of synthesizing and accumulating pictorial knowledge and meaningful material seems to not only legitimize but also increase the power of the imagery they use. Vodun and their images one would nowadays publicly encounter have a mnemonic function. They store aspects of past, present, and future, and are therefore part of powerful archives; certain modes and strategies of performative display are closely linked to material aspects of Vodun. Therefore, Vodun and their material culture are currently not only displayed in West African shrines. As part of artistic imagery and educative posts on social media, for example, they become part of decidedly contemporary imagery between questions of identity and alterity, accessible for a global audience; in European museum displays, they become part of the curators’ narrative. Taking a critical look at the entering of new spaces, like the ones of an European museum or the digital realm of the internet, questions about their (im)mobilization, appropriation, and continuous actualization arise. This chapter going to introduce certain aspects of the strong connections between the material culture and the display of Vodun in West African shrines, artistic positions and European museums to give some hints at the meaning and power of decidedly contemporary and globalized Vodun.
