International IHI students have postcolonial transformation of Saxon ethnology museums explained to them

Teaching the basics of intercultural communication is part of the founding DNA of IHI Zittau, born out of the original trinational cooperation of German, Polish and Czech students. Today, people from about 40 nations on four continents study at IHI Zittau. Accordingly, the courses offered in this field have been further developed and now focus more on the way cultures look at each other - and the political consequences of these views.

Currently, the ethnological collections of the Free State of Saxony with their museums in Leipzig, Dresden and Herrnhut with their director Léontine Meijer-van Mensch are actively and for exhibition visitors increasingly visibly dealing with how what is shown there is related to these cultural views - especially since these views are definitely worthy of criticism and thus the showing should be rethought. To show "exotic" cultures has not only legitimized art robberies in colonially subjugated territories (which today leads to difficult questions of ownership and restitution) - the fixation of foreign cultures as "exotic," the ignoring of religious and cultural meanings of objects that are now marveled at in foreign countries or even stored in depots, is also currently being rethought.

© IHI Zittau / Tettenborn

IHI students from Germany, Great Britain, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, and the Czech Republic joined Intercultural Studies lecturer Oliver Tettenborn to hear Léontine Meijer-van Mensch and curators Kevin Breß and Stefanie Bach explain the transformation currently underway at Leipzig's Grassi Museum.