Lisl Ponger | ...it belongs in a museum (Indiana Jones III)

“...it belongs in a museum” can be understood as a gesture of distinguishing an object and elevating it to the status of cultural heritage. It is a quotation from the film Indiana Jones III, in which the archaeology professor Dr Jones snatches from a few shady treasure hunters a work of art that holds a religious secret. Wrested from self-serving speculation, it is to be made available as a museum piece to science and to all of humanity. In the film the roles of good and evil are clearly assigned; in our exhibition, however, Dr Jones’s world is in part turned upside down.

Taking possession is always an act that requires justification, even when it is (supposedly) carried out in the name of all humanity and the appropriated objects are to be kept in a museum. Even public display becomes questionable, since objects removed from their original cultural context of use undergo a change in the museum: they become exhibits, and are categorised, ordered and evaluated. The act of appropriation through which they were removed from temples, places of worship and the corresponding contexts of life then seems to purify them through a European-shaped understanding of art. The artefacts are “sacred” to us only as works of art invested with an aura; their original religious meaning has been erased and acquires significance only as the content of ethnological reports.

Michel Leiris wrote just such a report on the occasion of a research expedition (from Dakar to Djibouti, 1931–1933). In it he addresses, among other things, the questionable collecting mania of ethnologists – “...it belongs in a museum” – and places it clearly in the vicinity of expropriation. In the context of the exhibition, these notes establish a conceptual network of relations in which Lisl Ponger’s photographs and objects are deliberately subjected to the play of contextual attributions of meaning. In the exhibition, the central focus on the appropriation of objects from non-European cultures and their re-sacralisation as works of art is also turned back on art history itself, on images and on exhibition practice. In our present-day world, however, it is not only objects and artefacts that are subject to appropriation – objects for everyday and ritual use that are then estranged through their conquest, made possible by mass tourism; signs and images, too, are carried by the travelling gaze into another level of meaning.