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COAPPARATION* -Lab has handed over Arbeitszimmer thealit to a new studio grant holder. From January 22 to February 16, Maria Karpushina and her invited project participants will examine the exhibition practice of the Überseemuseum in Bremen. It is the first part of a museological intervention that critically and experimentally questions the very act of exhibiting. The title of the entire project Altering Neutrality indicates that it will be about the blind spots of a supposedly neutral educational mission: "the object is presented against a neutral background, and the client focuses only on what they see."- The Metabolic Museum, Clémentine Deliss, 2020. 

The exhibition background, as it is omnipresent in museum history, is in fact always supposed to be (ideologically) neutral and 'facilitate sensory perception'. However, far from being neutral, this means aggressively rewriting the history of an object, maybe cutting off its roots, the net of references and meaning. "Dismantling the neutral background" implies that the neutrality of the exhibition space, as demanded by tradition, is questioned.

"Backgrounds are a source of fiction, which is revealed by questioning various actors who, by testifying to the existence and permanence of this fiction, at the same time make its dismantling conceivable," Maria Karpushina comments. Or: history, especially colonial history, is told in museums, and whoever recognizes this can try to change this story.

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