ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how museum exhibitions and artistic interventions can manifest and catalyse object relations. It focuses on a dress from the collection of the Museum Europäischer Kulturen—Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Museum of European Cultures). The chapter follows the object across two displays: the German Colonialism exhibition at the Deutsches Historisches Museum (German Historical Museum) in Berlin and Racism: The Invention of Human Races at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden. Focusing on the artefact and its counterparts on display, it illustrates the varying ways in which these exhibitions reveal relations. Against this background, the chapter investigates the case of an artistic intervention by Natasha A. Kelly at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden. This work reveals how collections might become conduits of inventive relatedness. Kelly’s critical, creative practice offers possibilities for re-envisioning relations through new modes of kin-making. Such engagement with collections can chip away at the dominant ways of knowing and relating in the museum space.
