On Monday, 2 June 2025, 4.15–6.30 pm, Dr. Isabel Hufschmidt (Vienna) will give her Fellow Lecture on the topic “Ur & Alexandria: Counter-narrating museum history to access diverse heritage” (in English) (room 201, 2nd floor of the Philosophikum, Domplatz 23):

“Ur & Alexandria” is a project about unlearning museum history that has been established as a meta-narrative by the Global North since the 19th century. Museum history is a pivotal catalyst in the obliteration and loss of diverse heritage and heritage practices. How to unfold the visibility and access of marginalized and endangered players, heritage practices, geographies, languages, temporalities and terminologies? The project offers a counter-narrative for the unlearning process, particularly to deconstruct gender bias and Occidental monopoly in museum history. The talk will give an insight into the project’s work processes and its perspective to establish the counter-narrative digitally through a virtual atlas based on deep mapping. It is about a multi-perspective historical approach with the access and sharing of the project to a global community.

Dr. Isabel Hufschmidt is a German art historian and curator. Her research interests include provenance and collection research, museum history, technological and media transformation in art and cultural production, sculpture and new media art, digitality and AI in cultural institutions, gender equality in historiographies as well as queer and decolonial strategies.