Review
“What becomes noticeable is the persistence of power plays translated outside the strictly politico-military exercise, in objects that belong to the public and cultural domain. Reproductions and objects referring to the campaigns led by Napoléon in which Denon was involved and then exhibited at the Louvre serve to highlight the Western colonial enterprise nourished and empowered by a reductive, fantasized vision of the Orient, as Said theorized. The more recent artifacts take part in the continuity of this violence, a postcolonial perspective on the visual and cultural productions of this fin-de-siècle. The Venus de Milo from the Letraset plate points to a peculiar understanding of culture and the museum, a notable bias in the visual embodiment of these notions.1 The Louvre’s new pyramid, opened in 1988 to the public, and designed by architect Ieoh Ming Pei as part of the “Grand Louvre” project, conjures up a historical dialogue that resonates with the present day.2 What continuity for the Western gaze, from Napoleon’s journey to Egypt to what is being built today to perfect the place for preserving the artifacts marked by this imperial history? The mobilization of the various objects acts as a memorial archive: each artifact carries the discourse and vision of an era, from colonial violence to new forms of soft power. They call into question the universalist ambitions of the Western institutional apparatus. Using the medium of the exhibition, [Fareed] Armaly’s project puts into practice and deconstructs the perspective on objects that, up until the time of his first [The] (re)Orient exhibition, had remained mute in their respective contexts, from popular culture to the fi ne arts, untroubled by the questioning of the violence they nonetheless carry.”
...
“Artifacts are taken as the source of investigation for the biased knowledge they carry. They allow the falsification of our suppositions and corroborate the mistrust that must be guarded against these objects when approaching them. As visitors we are invited to confront the unspoken, the forgotten, and leave the official discourses about them behind. [The] (re)Orient is an opportunity to build upon Said and Hall’s decolonial theoretical positioning with an exhibition that reveals their theoretical intertwinement in specific objects through their historical and current condition. With Armaly’s installation, the fear of knowledge is to be found when knowledge itself, encrypted in objects and artifacts, is not questioned in relation to the imperial and colonial history it is contingent to. What is to be feared lies in the pristine official discourse, whose counterpart is a post-hegemonic and postcolonial approach that unveils a more realistic perspective.”
(Excerpt)
Footnotes
- There is also a historical imperialist dimension, which is particularly topical at a time when most of the big European Museums are asked to return stolen artifacts to their countries of origin. ↩
- The “Grand Louvre” is one of the “Grands Travaux” defined by former French President François Mitterrand (President between 1981 and 1995), along with the new Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Bastille Opera House and the Grande Arche de la Défense. ↩