Changing interpretations of the Gallen-Kallela Museum s Africa collection

Museums have historically played a central role in the formation of national imaginaries and national identity. As a part of this national project, museums have actively participated in the (re)production of otherness through exhibiting colonial imagery and artefacts. This article scrutinizes the Gallen-Kallela Museum s Africa collection s exhibition history from a colonial perspective, and elaborates how this particular museum has exhibited the collection and communicated about the collection s colonial entanglements to the public. Through critical analysis of exhibitions from four decades (the years 1972, 1987, 1993 and 2003) we investigate what kind of a role the Gallen-Kallela Museum has played as a producer of colonial knowledge. The data includes different exhibition documentation from the museum s archive and media publications related to the exhibitions. By focusing on the agency of the museums, we analyse how exoticism is used in the exhibitions in different decades and how these exhibitionary discourses develop over time. We argue that explicit focus on the processes of knowledge production around colonial collections can enable making the intangible heritage of colonialism visible. Addressing power hierarchies and embedded colonial ideologies is the first step in starting to overcome the colonial legacies entangled in these collections.