Course Catalogue

Logo
35 Jahre Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln

Course Catalogue WS 2024/25

GESTURES OF (RE)PAIR: TOWARDS A MUSEUM THAT BELONGS

Type:
Specialist seminar
Semester:
WS 25/26
Target group
Main course / Diploma 2
Max participants:

15 

Requirement

To participate in the seminar, please submit a short motivation paragraph before 29.09.2025 to donna.kukama@khm.de.


Seminar language: English


Open to students of Diploma 1


Seminar duration: Winter Semester (research and excursion) & Summer Semester (on-site activation)

Dates - place & time

TypStartEndDayTurnusfrom-toLocation
27.10.2526.01.26MondayWöchentlich14:00 - 17:00Filzengraben 2a, Atelier 2 / room 2
Typ
Start27.10.25
End26.01.26
DayMonday
TurnusWöchentlich
from-to14:00 - 17:00
LocationFilzengraben 2a, Atelier 2 / room 2

Seminar description

GESTURES OF (RE)PAIR: TOWARDS A MUSEUM THAT BELONGS


In a majority of contexts, the frameworks through which museums have historically operated are deeply entangled with colonial conquest, imperial violence, and the epistemological dominance of the West. Whether ethnographic, natural history, or so-called “universal” art institutions, museums have not only collected but also extracted. They have not only protected but also erased. They have not only displayed but also distorted. Contemporary art museums are also not free from these entanglements. While acknowledging the visible, felt, and audible shifts within museums such as Melly Institute under the direction of Gabi Ngcobo, and the Haus der Kulturen de Welt under the direction of Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, this seminar aims to further unearth the inherent violence within historical museum practices while proposing new models that exist beyond the frameworks of museology in the Western context. Thinking alongside artistic practices such as Irena Haiduk’s “Nula”, Meschack Gaba’s “Museum of Contemporary African Art”, and multiple contemporary examples, students are invited to imagine and construct a museum that listens and belongs.


In creating our own (non)museum, we will also reference "non-institutional" practices that allow us to reimagine its potential as a living, breathing, morphing and expansive structure. Through a deep engagement with ritual, oral tradition, storytelling, music, dance, sonic memory, and speculative thinking, we will explore how knowledge systems rooted in indigenous and diasporic cosmologies from the Global Majority can offer alternative conceptions of how a museum can become a fluid space. A place of convergence that understands that sometimes objects sing and weep, that the archive sweats, and that architectures breathe. A site where knowledge is not fixed but felt, and where the death of the institution is not feared but welcomed as a fertile ground for rebirth. A museum that is brave enough to collapse, generous enough to transform, and rooted enough to be shaped by the worlds it seeks to belong to.


Guest curators, guest artists, a reading list, and excursion dates will be announced to participating students at the start of the Winter Semester 2025-26. To participate in the seminar, please submit a very brief paragraph of motivation (written, sonic, visual, or in any creative form) by email to donna.kukama@khm.de before 29.09.2025.

Student office

Student Office

Karin Cordes

Juliane Schwibbert

Claudia Warnecke

Heumarkt 14, 50667 Köln

+49 221 20189 - 194 /119 / 187 / 249
studoffice@khm.de


Opening hours:   Mondays + Tuesdays from 10 a.m. - 1 p.m. + Thursdays from 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.

For enquiries or appointments, please call us, Mon - Thu 9.30 to 1 p.m., or send us an e-mail.


Summer semester 2025

Lecture period:
​​​​​​​Apr. 14, 2025 until Jul. 25, 2025


Winter semester 2025/26

Lecture period:
​​​​​​​Oct. 20, 2025 until Feb. 13, 2026

Please wait