Fetish Modernity

The exhibition on Fetish Modernity which was held at the Royal Museum for Central Africain Tervuren, Brussels - Belgium from April 8 to September 4,  2011, marks a trend that has been gaining ground for a few years now in this mecca of culture and numerous ethnographic museums in Europe.

The Museo de América - Madrid, Náprstek's Muzeum - Prague, the Museum für Völkerkunde, Vienna,  Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden and Etnografiska Museet, Stockholm will also mount  their own exhibitions on the same theme. is linked to the European project known as RIME (Réseau international Des Musees Ethnographiques), International Network of Ethnographic Museums.

For the curators of the exhibition in Tervuren, Anne-Marie Bouttiaux * and Anna Seiderer, modernity is just a fetishized concept, a cliché, a discrimination.

One section of the exhibition takes a critical look at, “the factory of clichés” that once filled ethnographic museums.  Another, "Mystic Village" consists of an installation of objects of worship from diverse faiths, where it would be risky to try and detect modernity according to origin. As well as the simple pleasure of viewing works of great beauty and full of meaning, what you take away from the exhibition is that the real engine of modernism is simply the desire present, in any place or time, to renew artistic production and social practices. As shown in the photographic work of Eric Lafforgue of a Papuan with a CD-ROM as a nose ring, fetishism of any kind engenders the projection of desires, on which we create modernity.

* See our full length interview on The Courier’s website www.acp-courier.eu

Hegel Goutier