Associate Members

Rikke Gram

© Tal Adler

CARMAH members’ portraits were captured in March 2017, on the ‘New55 PN’ – a new handmade instant film for large format, 4”x5” cameras. This film was launched through crowdfunding in 2014 as a reinvention of the discontinued, legendary ‘Type 55’ by Polaroid. Since the sixties, Polaroid’s unique ‘Type 55’ starred in many artists’ and professional photographers’ projects. ‘Type 55’ provided both an instant print and a superb negative from which more (and larger) prints could be made. Like so many photographic material in the last 10-15 years, ‘Type 55’ was discontinued in 2009. Tal Adler decided to use the ‘New55 PN’ not only for its beautiful quality but also to reflect, and participate in, the revival of (photographic) heritage.

I am Research Fellow at the Institute for Migration and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) at the University of Osnabrück, working on the project Cultural Production in the Migration Society. I received my Master’s degree at the Institute of European Ethnology in 2019 and I am especially interested in studying the role of minorities and migration in and for museums. I was a student assistant at CARMAH from 2016 to 2018, where I was in charge of various organisational tasks such as website maintenance, as well as research-related tasks such as syllabus curation and transcription. As part of CARMAH’s ‘Representing Islam’ project, I conducted research through long-term ethnographic fieldwork with the Multaka project. My research was on some of the current transformations taking place in Berlin’s museums as reactions to recent societal developments in the city, and looked at what is being done in order to create space in the museums for people of Arabic origin. I am also interested in looking at public engagement in museums and with heritage in a global perspective, especially thought together with critical reflections on knowledge production in and beyond academia. On this subject, together with Christine Gerbich, I organised the workshop On Common Grounds? Researching Public Engagement of Museums and Heritage Sites.