Disentangling the Object from the Gaze: Call for Responses
Crossmopollinate invites you to participate in Path Through the City, a collaborative project with the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg, and the Völkerkundemuseum der J. & E. von Portheim-Stiftung Heidelberg. As part of the European Conference for South Asian Studies (ECSAS) 2025.
Our contribution to the ECSAS: Disentangling the Object from the Gaze, has been developed in collaboration with artist Sharmila Samant, whose work critically engages with the afterlives of colonial material culture, interrogating the ways in which objects accrue and lose meaning over time. By foregrounding histories of displacement, resistance, and adaptation, she creates spaces where multiple voices—particularly those marginalized by institutional collections—can assert their perspectives. This aligns closely with our project’s aim of disentangling objects from the imperial gaze and reinscribing them with contemporary, lived meanings.
Our project focuses on everyday objects housed in the museum’s archive. Many of these items were originally utilitarian—wicker baskets, canvas bags, metal containers—yet have been recontextualized and assigned new value through their placement in the museum. Through this project, we seek to question: What makes an object valuable? Who decides? How does the colonial baggage of ethnological museums continue to shape our perception of objects today?
By bringing objects from the VKM archive into dialogue with contemporary voices from South Asia, we challenge static notions of value. In the google form below you will find a selection of images of these objects, we invite you to respond to these images with a story, a poem, or a sound, guided by the question: Which of these objects is valuable to you, and why? Through this exchange, we seek to reanimate the archive with new narratives, shifting their meanings beyond the imperial gaze.
How You Can Participate?
We invite you to engage with a selection of objects from the Völkerkundemuseum’s collection. Through the link below, you will find a set of images that you can flip through. Choose one or more objects that resonate with you and respond by sharing a personal memory, a story, a poem, a sound, or even an image of an object from your own life that relates to what you see.
Your responses will become part of an evolving collection of contemporary meanings and associations, helping us reanimate these objects beyond their colonial gaze.
