On 10 November 2026, our colleague Yohannes Mulat Mekonnen will give a lecture at the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur in Münster as part of the symposium Transcolonial Performing Provenance: Art, Memory and Colonial Resonance.
His lecture, Topology of the Sacred: Missionary Collection and the Ordering of Spiritual Worlds, looks at missionary collecting as shaped by two contradictory processes: erasure and preservation. Mission museums preserved material expressions of the very spiritual worlds that missionary work sought to transform. By collecting heritage associated with other religious practices, missionaries also positioned themselves as custodians of those traditions, establishing a hierarchy between those who collect and those whose spiritual lives become collections. The lecture explores this paradox, asking how missionary collections bring different Worldviews into contact while establishing and justifying hierarchies between them.
You can find the full programme here.