Seminar with Doreen Mende: Vulnerable Processes, Art and Research in Conversation

The seminar is part of the project Samtidskonstens sporrar
Read more about the project here.

Doreen Mende, Director of the Research Department at Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, explores how curatorial research can engage with the diasporic lives of objects and material entities in museum collections. Drawing on the 500-year history of the Dresden museum complex — shaped by electorates, monarchies, colonialism, Enlightenment, and shifting state logics — Mende reflects on objects as witnesses of entangled histories and futures.

Her lecture offers insights into research methods at Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, including initiatives such as the Stannaki Forum and the Transcultural Academy, which seek to pluralise the concept of history and rethink museums as democratic sites for the 21st century. Through conversations between contemporary art and specialised museum research - from provenance studies to restoration - Mende invites us to consider history as an unfinished process, and to engage with heterotemporal and transgenerational perspectives on material culture.

Doreen Mende is a curator, academic, and Director of the cross-collections Research Department at Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden since 2021. She initiated the Stannaki Forum. Art and Research in Conversation and the Transcultural Academy, bringing together international partners around themes such as Futurities and Unfinished Publics. Her curatorial practice spans major research-based exhibitions including Sequences: Entangled Internationalisms (Albertinum, 2023/24), Candida Höfer: Context. A Dresden Reflection (2024), and The Missed Seminar (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin). Mende co-founded the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin and was associate professor of curatorial/politics at HEAD Genève (2015–2025). Her research focuses on decolonisation, entangled internationalisms, and the politics of display.

Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm
Part of the National Museums of World Culture since 1999, the Museum of Ethnography holds around 220,000 artefacts reflecting the cultural anthropology of communities from Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. Its origins date to early Swedish colonial expeditions and scientific collections. Located in Museiparken at Gärdet, the museum is also home to the Sven Hedin Foundation.

In collaboration with Sweden’s Museums

Image 1: Japanisches Palais i Dresden © Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
Image 2: Carl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein, portrait of „Aquasie Boachi, Prinz von Aschantiland“, 1849, Stadt- und Bergbaumuseum Freiberg, Inv. 53/237 for Stannaki Forum „Aquasi Boachi” 6 June 2023, published by Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and Hatje Cantz