Museums of world culture have seldom engaged in self-conscious examination of how their collections were constituted. What were the logistics for transporting these artifacts and how did this material culture become a source for knowledge production in the West? In short, how did the world come to Europe? 

Crating the World, a project by artist Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, brings together artistic research with essays by leading scholars to examine the historical and ideological constructions of material culture through collecting and photographic practices. Expanding on Nguyễn’s traveling exhibition Black Atlas, originally hosted in 2016 by the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, Sweden, this book deploys rare and previously unpublished archival material as testimony to the silenced histories of exploitation on which the institution is built. 

Co-edited by Rado Ištok and Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn

Contributors: Ariella Azoulay, Michael Barrett, Ulrika Flink, Åsa Bharathi Larsson, Wayne Modest, Gabrielle Moser, and Vincent Normand