ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains about the importance of cultural difference, the way its presence is reflected in contemporary art and the way it relates to knowledge creation. It attempts to trace and rationalise absence by focusing on the acts of its reproduction by archiving and exhibition making. The book argues that museums, consciously and unconsciously, actualise all three types of absence. These absences simultaneously embed a potential for their undoing. The book focuses on the figure of Joseph Beuys, whose display at the Hamburger Bahnhof first led me to questions about the relationships between museum collections, communities and museal narratives. It looks at the spatial environments that museal knowledge creation involves. The book analyses the operation of museal discourse in relation to important changes in collecting practices that private collections have brought along with them.
