Goethe Institute, Nigerian museums launch fellowship programme

The Connecting the Dots project running till 2025, will boost museum scholarship and enjoyment in the country.

TO boost museum scholarship and facilitate engagement, education and enjoyment of historical and contemporary art in Nigerian museums, Goethe-Institut, supported by The Ford Foundation, has launched the ‘Connecting the Dots’ project.

The initiative running till 2025, is divided into three broad areas: establishing a young scholars museum fellowship programme, a museum conversation series and a youth education programme.

Six Nigerian Musems including Slave History Museum, Calabar; National Museum, Kaduna; Benin City National Museum; CRIMMD Photo History Museum, Lagos; Colonial History Museum, Aba and the Natural History Museum, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. are participating in the programme.

A statement from the Goethe Institut explained that the project, with three main pillars, Museum Fellowship Programme, Conversation Series and Youth Education Programme, will further popularise museums among Nigerians.

It explained that the “Museum Fellowship Programme will focus on a critical engagement with Nigerian museum content and the creation of research results that engage contemporary topics such as democracy, African traditional leadership systems, gender, generational difference, justice and social cohesion.”

The Museum Conversation Series happening in the six participating museums will, apart from the audiences, “target artists seeking to work with the collections and ground their work in research. “

The last, the Youth Education Programme, will see young people “invited to make visual representations of artefacts, heritage, culturally significant symbols or entities and other parts of the communities’ histories and how these objects resonate with them. It will elicit young people’s interpretations of the objects and their significance in their cultures or lives, rather than a presentation of the objects themselves.”

The organisers have invited artists/art researchers, archaeologists, architects, social researchers, writers, journalists, historians, and cultural producers to apply for the museum fellowship programme.

“The fellowship programme aims to bring six young scholars/researchers from within Nigeria and abroad to study at selected museums and produce knowledge that addresses critical aspects of the museum’s content. In addition to a broad focus on the curatorial process and historical relevance of displays, the programme seeks to address contemporary challenges facing Nigeria and contribute to advancing the role of museums in addressing key national development challenges,” the statement read.

The fellowship will run from October 2023 till October 2024. It will see selected fellows working with a Nigerian museum and Goethe-Institut in creating new research, knowledge and engagements that speak to the museum’s research interest and community.

Fellows will also participate in museum conversations with experts at the museum and other relevant programmes, monthly virtual meetings with the project coordinator and publish research work at the end.

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