Location: Piața Mare / Grand Square, Sibiu
Duration: 20.07 – 30.09.2023
Opening: Brukenthal Palace, 20.07.2023, 6:00 pm
Partner: Sibiu City Hall
Curators: Dana Roxana Hrib, Alexandru Constantin Chituță
Graphics: Chris Balthes
The exhibition is part of a project co-financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund
In the tenth edition of his work Systema Naturae, the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778) divided the human species into four systematic categories, according to color: European white, American red, Asiatic yellow, and African black; to these he added the category “monstrous” for wild and monstrous people, unknown groups, and more or less abnormal individuals. Obviously, the content of the fifth category related to what Linnaeus considered to be known, civilized and specific to the culture from which he came and which he considered normative.
The exhibition presents a brief history of discrimination on skin color criterion, illustrated by works of European painting from the 16th to the 18th c., an approach showing us that ignorance determined at least as many abuses as political and economic instrumentalization, induced by colonial systems. It is important to understand this pattern of thinking because, between the ruling classes – generators of ideology and ordinary people – mostly indifferent or lacking in knowledge, art constituted the intermediate stage of the institutionalization of racism, during several centuries.
The 16 panels present the beginnings of race ideology from ancient ethnocentrism to the concept of blood purity and the condition of non-European, the doctrine of discoveries, ethnographic exhibitions or human zoos, the justification of the segregation of whole peoples or ethnic groups, based on pseudo-scientific theories about the color of the epidermis; you can also learn more about what colorism means and little-known practices such as the test of wrapping paper whose color determined the separation of slaves for domestic work from those sent to agricultural work or the toxic practices of skin whitening.