Talks
Elke Krasny
Conundrums of Curating: Museum, Care, and Violence
06 November 2026
What does it mean to care for objects, collections, and histories shaped by violence? This lecture examines the entanglements of care and violence in the museum, approaching curating not as a practice of collection, interpretation and display, but as a site of ethical and political negotiation. Museums inherit histories of colonial extraction, dispossession, and epistemic violence, while their contemporary commitments to care, restitution, and repair remain implicated in institutional structures that reproduce asymmetries of power. How might curatorial practices acknowledge these contradictions without turning care into a redemptive gesture or violence into a closed historical chapter? Rather than proposing care as an antidote to violence, the lecture considers the limits, ambiguities, and possibilities of curating within institutions marked by unequal relations of ownership, authority, and knowledge. It asks what forms of responsibility become possible through practices of refusal and rematriation.