Renegotiating Material Culture 

Exhibition & artistic research project – project leader & curator
Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm
2020

Renegotiating Material Culture was an exhibition and artistic research project that explored how museum collections can be reinterpreted through contemporary craft practice. The project was developed as a collaboration between the Museum of Ethnography and Konstfack’s Research Lab Craft! program.

Students were invited to research the museum’s African collections and critically engage with questions of materiality, authorship, and representation. Through their own craft-based practices, they produced new interpretations that challenged colonial narratives and opened up alternative readings of the objects and their histories.

The exhibition positioned artistic research as a method for renegotiating material culture — not as static heritage, but as living knowledge shaped by context, power, and making. By bridging institutional archives with contemporary craft, the project created space for reflection, dialogue, and decolonial perspectives within the museum setting.

Role: Project leader & curator
Collaborators: Matt Smith, course leader Research Lab Craft!, Konstfack - university of arts, craft and design.

Participants: Students at Research Lab Craft!
Venue: Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm