Nanette Snoep
Dutch anthropologist and curator, Nanette Snoep, has been working since 2016 at the head of various ethnographic museums in Germany, after being a curator at the Quai Branly museum for a long period of time.
In her exhibitions, she disrupts the way ethnographic collections are presented, not hesitating to propose themes that challenge established knowledge associated to the conception of projects for new audiences (alternative scene, migrants, artists).
In addition, Nanette Snoep actively participates in contemporary debates on the restitution of museal collections acquired during colonization, in Germany and in France.
Since 2019, Nanette Snoep is director of the ethnographic museum of Cologne, Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museums – Kulturen der Welt.
Before, she was director of the three ethnographic museums in Saxony (Germany) for four years, where she was able to experiment with new exhibition formats.
In the ethnographic museum Grassi in Leipzig, she invited art students, artists in exile and migrants, but also individuals considered marginal because they were tattooed or pierced, to participate in the design of various exhibition projects.
In the cycle Prolog #1-10 Histoires d’invividus, d’objets et de lieux (2016 – 2018) in Dresden, she proposed an evolutive “exhibition-workshop” that questions themes on colonialism, restitutions, the history of objects, their strangeness or the classification operated by museums.
In June 2018, this experience was extended in Leipzig under the name of Werkstatt Prolog.
For her latest exhibition in Leipzig, Megalopolis – Voix de Kinshasa, she gave Carte Blanche to 24 artists and writers from Kinshasa, to design and produce their own exhibition in the Congolese capital.
From 1998 to 2014, Nanette Snoep was curator at the Quai Branly museum in Paris, where she was in charge of the History Heritage Unit.
There, she curated the following exhibitions: L’Invention du Sauvage (2011, Prize for the best exhibition at the Crystal Globes), and in 2012 Les Maîtres du Désordre.
Nanette Snoep also taught African art history for ten years at the Ecole du Louvre, the University of Nanterre and the EHESS in Paris.
Linkss
• “Œuvres africaines mal acquises : l’Allemagne face à ses trous de mémoire” by Aimie Eliot and Aimie Eliot in Le Monde, octobre 2018
• “Nanette Jacomijn Snoep appointed new Director of the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony in artdaily”
• “Decolonising requires dialogue”, expertise and support – The Heidelberg Statement
