On the museum’s latent violence: Cameron Rowland’s ‘Amt 45 i’

In 2023 Cameron Rowland (b.1988) mounted an exhibition at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt. Exhibiting historical artefacts and conceptual and legal gestures, Rowland revealed the not-so-indirect links between the public museum and the private wealth of Frankfurt’s banks, situating their origins in the transatlantic slave trade. The history Rowland narrated – that Germany played an active role in the slave trade and owes its modern economic and cultural dominance to this role – has been largely neglected. The exhibition both asserted material evidence of the continuity of colonial violence in present-day Germany and indicted the contemporary art museum as unequivocally enmeshed in the legacies of this history. This article analyses Rowland’s interventions, examining how they subvert the tactics of historical racialised dispossession to simultaneously expose institutions’ complicity in these tactics and repossess a fraction of the wealth extracted through them. Yet, as this article argues, the work is not immune to the forces it seeks to critique.