The Metabolic Museum

The Metabolic Museum

As part of our focus on Tenderness, curator and cultural historian Clémentine Deliss presents her extended concept of the metabolic museum, an institution understood to be as fragile and transformative as the human body in the 21st century. In her talk, she presents the curatorial and artistic research performed with artists, writers, and lawyers at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt/Main between 2010-2015. Unpacking the dilemmas facing Germany’s ethnographic museums, she proposes a way of working that supports the healing and remediation of these contentiously acquired collections. Here the museum becomes a university for visual education, a venue for the democratic and decolonial intellect.

Dr. Clémentine Deliss is Global Humanities Visiting Professor of History of Art, Department of Art History, University of Cambridge and Associate Curator of KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Her practice crosses the borders of contemporary art, curatorial experimentation, and critical anthropology. Between 2010–2015, she directed the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt instituting a new lab for post-ethnographic research. She was a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study Berlin and has taught art theory and curatorial practice at the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy, Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, and the Hamburg University of the Arts. Her book “The Metabolic Museum” was published by Hatje Cantz in co-production with KW (2020) and in Russian translation with Garage Publishing (2021). She lives in Berlin.