M HKA Ensembles

As with a number of exhibitions M HKA has organised in recent years exploring questions we feel to be relevant for society and culture at large, Monoculture – A Recent History is transdisciplinary. Along with its core focus on visual art, we also include various historical artefacts into a dialogue.

The exhibition Monoculture – A Recent History approaches monoculture, or ‘cultural homogeneity’, from various historical, social and ideological perspectives, as well as philosophical and linguistic ones. As a museum for art and visual culture, M HKA has looked at many different case studies from approximately the last one hundred years in order to consider the impetus for monoculture or the monocultural self-image, and how this has been reflected in artistic work as well as in propaganda and philosophical thought. With so much emphasis on multiculturalism, and the contentions that have come with it in different societies, our intention was to look at what is considered, on the face of it at least, to be its opposite. Seeking as much as possible to consider monoculture not as something exclusively conservative or right-wing, the exhibition rather considers it as something that can be found across social and ideological partialities. 

The case studies include:

Agriculture
Ambiguity (Else Frenkel-Brunswik ; Philosophical Thought)
Eugenics (Eugenics in Britain, North America, and Nazi Germany; the case of the exhibition Das Wunder des Lebens)
Nazism (Blut und Boden; Nazi propaganda exhibitions; Anti-Semitism in Flanders)
Colonialism (Colonial Exhibitions and the Human Zoo; Apartheid)
Négritude (Sources of Inspiration for Léopold Senghor; Senghor's Theory of Négritude;The First World Festival of Negro Arts; Authenticité)
Soviet Union (Soviet National Politics; Socialist Realism; Mass-Produced Reproductions of Soviet Paintings; The Corn Campaign)
Cold War (Soviet Propaganda; Congress for Cultural Freedom)|
Capitalism (Das Kapital; Ronald Reagan; Objectivism; Call for an Alternative)
Culture Wars (Cultural Relativism; Unipolarity; Segregation; Identity Politics; Key Exhibitions in New York; American Context; Belgian Context)
The Non-Aligned Movement (OSPAAAL and Tricontinental magazine; Bandung Conference, 1955; Further Non-Aligned Movement Conferences)
Nation
Migration
Religion
Universalism (Universal Declaration of Human Rights; Universalist Exhibitions; Universal Languages; Modernism)

Most of the artefacts, including rare first-edition publications and paraphernalia, were acquired by the museum specifically for the exhibition. Consequently, the artefacts were preserved as part of the museum archive, with the intention of providing open access for researchers.

M HKA in no way endorses the extremist ideologies, historical acts of intolerance and sensitive images or texts that were shown in the exhibition. As a museum for art and visual culture, we consider it important to use and contextualise this material, bringing it in dialogue with contemporary art and discourse, in order to ask relevant questions about society and culture at large.

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