Decolonised representations and dissonances in museums: the case of the Korean gallery at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin

초록

This study investigates how decolonial discourse and Korean cultural diplomacy intersect within the Korean Gallery at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. It argues that the Forum's decolonial ambition - while seeking to challenge Eurocentric hierarchies - inevitably interacts with Korea's state-led aesthetic diplomacy, producing layered forms of representational dissonance. Through textual, curatorial, and field analysis of exhibitions, catalogues, press coverage, and policy documents, the paper examines three key areas: the aesthetics of traditional art, the colonial mediation of photographic images, and the ethnographic displacement of the jangseung (village guardian pole). These cases reveal that decolonial museology functions not as a coherent framework but as a contested field of negotiation between institutional authority, national visibility, and community-based claims to heritage. By tracing the jangseung's trajectory from ritual boundary marker to ethnographic artefact and, more recently, to an emblem of community-driven restitution activism, the study demonstrates how dissonance operates as a constitutive condition of heritage rather than a curatorial failure. Ultimately, it calls for a participatory and polyvocal model of museology that transforms tension into a generative space of dialogue between restitution, recognition, and representation.

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