Stannaki Forum is a research format that enables discursive exchange across different knowledge horizons. The focus is on a specific object that serves as both witness and interlocutor. The objects reflect contexts such as colonialism, enslavement, dispossession, and cultural appropriation, but also diplomacy, exile, migration, economic relations, and education. The Stannaki Forum aims to recognize these contextual entanglements and thus bring to life the diasporic histories of the 500-year-old State Collections.

Doreen Mende is director of the cross-collections Research Department at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden [State Collections of Art Dresden], associate professor at HEAD Genève of HES-SO, and co-founder of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin.