Out in the Museum

In the “Out in the Museum” project, young people from Frankfurt’s Sindlingen district explored the Weltkulturen Museum. In the initial session, they looked behind the scenes and gained insight into the museum’s many different tasks with its collections, image archive, library and restoration workshops.

Afterwards, the peer team members immersed themselves inA LABOUR OF LOVE, an exhibition showcasinga selection of art works, primarily prints, by black artists in South Africa during the apartheid years. These works, acquired by the museum in 1986, were juxtaposed with new art works by young South African artists, facilitating a revaluation of the older works and their historical background.

The titleA LABOUR OF LOVE reflects the diverse ways of reading the notion of love – love between couples, in the family or in an activist group. Yet it equally addresses forms of love in complex hierarchical relationships between, for example, mentor and student or patron and artist.

Supported by the Weltkulturen Museum team of educators, the young people critically engaged with art as a medium informed by hierarchies and power relations, and formulate and artistically expressed their own ideas and concerns in the context of their everyday life. In this process, the young participants were introduced to different media and printing techniques, and design and print posters in a printing workshop.

The young participants also created a small museum app presenting their own perspectives on individual art works. In a performative tour of the exhibition, the posters and app served as a basis to convey their own access to the exhibition to other young people.

In addition, the posters were shown in a public exhibition in Sindlingen, the district where the young project participants live. In this way, the young people’s views and insights reached an audience outside of the museum. (28th April until 16th May 2016)

In cooperation with Meisterschule Sindlingen and Jugendclub Sindlingen
30th March - 6th April 2016

Video

Project Participants:
Celine Babutzka
Rabia Ilbay
Vivian Messer
Angelina Romanowski
Pamir Sher
Jan Smailovic
Sem Thomas

Project Management:
Stephanie Endter, Esther Poppe, Ani Schulze and Silke Wagner (Weltkulturen Museum)

Project Assistence:
Julia Köchling, Nathalie Walter (Weltkulturen Museum)

Cooperation Partner:
Malte Bartmann (Jugendhilfe an der Meisterschule)
Nadina Smajlovic and Max Straßburger (Jugendclub Sindlingen)

Film & Photo:
Esper Postma