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Five Images of an Image: The Museum of African Art in Belgrade

Archival photograph of the permanent display of the Museum of African Art, Belgrade. Courtesy the Museum of African Art
Anders Kreuger pays a new visit to a museum that he remembered as an image of a non-colonial collection of African Art — and of the time when it was created. The body and the brain are, for Bergson, nothing more and nothing less than images among other images. And since the part cannot possibly create or contain the whole — a trick possible only in language — the world cannot possibly exist only inside the brain. Nor, indeed, can memory-images be ‘stored’ there, because if perception-images are ‘in some sense matter’, then memory-images are ‘already spirit’: the past is preserved in the past in general (a Bergsonian statement that sounds simpler than it is) and we will look in vain for traces of it in the tissues of our body.