By the 1970s the term globalization gained currency in academic and corporate discourse as a means of describing the increasing interconnectedness of economies and cultures. Now an indubitable fact, globalization stirs attention across the political spectrum. While right-wing detractors are touting a protectionist vision of the (ethnic) nation-state, centrists retreat to shallow attempts to defend globalization as a peace-promoting, culture-enriching project. The contradictions brought about by globalization are also reflected in the legacy of the left. In the late 1990s and early 2000s left-wing groups mobilized an alter-globalization movement, which contended with social injustice and uneven distribution under capitalism, yet was unable to revive the internationalist political ambitions of the labor movement of the early twentieth century. In this context, an exhibition thematizing global interconnections is bound to navigate a political minefield. The exhibition Vernetzte Welten. Globalisierung im Fokus [Interconnected Worlds: Globalization in Focus] at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (10 April–24 August, 2025) embraces the liberal celebration of multiculturalism while gesturing vaguely at the inequalities that capitalist globalization has perpetuated.
Organized around five thematic clusters, the exhibition sets out to illustrate the interconnectedness of the world by foregrounding seemingly unsuspected everyday objects. Traversing categories such as travel, clothing, and food, the exhibition effectively demonstrates that our everyday lives are deeply imbricated in global economic flows. Featuring objects as disparate as Hans Wimmers’ bust of a Black woman known as Aba (bronze, 1966), pizza plates, jeans, and McDonald’s packaging, Vernetzte Welten addresses the worldwide circulation of people, commodities, and forms. The display of objects with such globe-spanning histories at an institution such as the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, which was established in 1852 to galvanize national sentiment among the then-fragmented German-speaking states, is no small accomplishment. Another major merit of the exhibition lies in the selection of objects—most saliently, in the juxtaposition of singular art objects and ubiquitous consumer products. Given the proximity of many of the exhibits to everyday experience, it is worth examining how the audience is encouraged to rethink their relationship with both art and mundane objects.
Despite its focus on ordinary things, the exhibition remains largely devoted to questions of aesthetics and representation. Power relations are more readily addressed in historical, rather than contemporary contexts, and more so in relation to art. For instance, Barbara Rosina de Gasc’s portrait of Karl Friedrich Albrecht, the Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt, with an unnamed Black attendant (oil on canvas, 1737) prompts a discussion of the latter’s anonymity in historical records and of the now-virtually-forgotten presence of enslaved Black people at European courts. Moving forward in time and shifting the focus to everyday objects, the display tracing the production stages of a pair of contemporary jeans elicits no comparable reflection on the largely-hidden labor conditions currently imposed on the people who handle such commodities at various stages of their globe-spanning journey from cotton flower to style item. Unlike colonialism, contemporary racial capitalism—that is, the structuring of racial categories to justify and maintain labor exploitation for the sake of profit accumulation—remains unnamed. Instead, such power relations are obscured by narratives of cultural exchange. For instance, a pizza plate is presented as a problematic stereotypical depiction of “Italianness”, while pizzerias opened by Italian workers in West Germany are credited with paving the way to “acceptance and integration.” By not looking into other sectors, such as agriculture, construction, and automobile production, the complex story of Italian labor migration is reduced to the stereotype that the display set out to critique.
Nonetheless, a critical perspective on how production and exchange structure social relations is offered by another display which looks farther into the past. In the section “Exchange,” a vitrine showing a series of crescent-shaped bronze manilas used as currency in the slave trade testifies to the unequal, and often outright dehumanizing, power relations underpinning the global flow of things during the early modern period. More generally, however, the social relations shaped by the production and distribution of the objects displayed remain conveniently in the shadow of free-flowing symbols and forms. For instance, the exhibition overlooks the much-discussed connection between ecological and social injustices as well as now generalized power dynamics engendered by the rise of the fossil industries since the Industrial Revolution. These structural determinations figure only in the shape of globally distributed consumer objects – jeans, plastic lawn chairs, and Pokémon cards.
This privileging of surface-level phenomena is also apparent in the exhibition workshop space, where the audience can craft their own artistic contribution on small rectangular slips of paper. A collection of coffee-table books lavishly illustrated with ornaments spanning various timeframes and geographies serves as inspiration and as a reminder of the shared world of symbols in which the viewer is invited to partake. This activity sits well with the overall nostalgia for a frictionless, end-of-history view of globalization, manifested for instance in showing, behind-glass, a T-Shirt imprinted with Tocotronic’s 1995 song title “Ich möchte Teil einer Jugendbewegung sein” [“I want to be part of a youth movement”]. Displayed here as an instance of the global flow of textile production, the T-shirt’s message could also be read as a hint to the commodification of protest movements. Tocotronic’s song speaks—tongue in cheek—to a desire to form a youth movement not as a political project but in terms of an overall search for meaning, social cohesion, and a desire for rebellious belonging, at a time when alter-globalization movements were growing internationally. These movements do not figure in the exhibition—neither their aspirations, nor their demise. Rather, Vernetzte Welten is indicative of these movements’ alienation from workers and their sliding more and more into culturalism, insofar as it foregrounds a cultural history of globalization decades after the emergence of a multipronged, transnational critique of sweatshops, uneven development, and environmental injustice.
The exhibition’s main limitation stems from shying away from long-established critiques that have unpacked global capitalism as a crisis-ridden dynamic that feeds on, and thus is bound to reproduce, inequality. Fittingly, the exhibition culminates with a collective, interactive display—a world map which audience members are invited to fill out with stickers representing their age group, latest travel destination, and the reason for travel (“hiking”; “camping”; “culture”; “work”; “water sports” etc.). Summing up the viewer’s encounter with the exhibition, the world map calls attention to personal experience, intercultural exchange, leisure and work activities, and not to the heart of the material conditions that shape our lives.
FURTHER READINGS
- Vivek Chibber. The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022.
- David Harvey. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
- Naomi Klein. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Knopf Canada, 1999.
- Andreas Malm. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso, 2016.
- Neil Smith. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. University of Georgia Press, 1990.
- Notes from Nowhere (ed.). We are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism. Verso, 2003.
- Aram Ziai. Development Discourse and Global History: From Colonialism to the Sustainable Development Goals. Routledge, 2016.
ALEXANDRA MASGRAS is a post-doctoral fellow at the research group “Kunst, Umwelt, Ökologie” at ZI, headed by LINN BURCHERT, who also conducts the project “Klimagipfelkunst. Kunst und politisches Event, 1972–2022”, funded by the German Research Council.
