Anja Nitz

A museum repository is comparable to the heart of an organism. Exploring a museum storeroom can provide insights that cannot be communicated in an exhibition. This is particularly true of anthropological museums. Thousands of objects in collections are summarised, titled, digitalised, hidden, or rediscovered here.

In her photographic work about the storerooms of the Saxon State Ethnographic Collections, the Berlin-based artist Anja Nitz (*1971) confronts the collection’s culture. Through her gaze, the boundaries between the collection’s exponents and the work done in the museum’s repository blur. Clad in their wrappings, objects from the collections are photographed in the places where they are kept. These photographs are eyewitnesses to the current debates about how to deal with the legacy of colonialism and provide some transparency about the current situations of repositories and collections at the anthropological museums in Leipzig, Dresden, and Herrnhut.

Text in English and German.