HELLO WORLD
HAMBURGUER BAHNHOF . BERLIN . GERMANY
2018
Curators : Udo Kittelmann with Sven Beckstette, Daniela Bystron, Jenny Dirksen, Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Gabriele Knapstein, Melanie Roumiguière and Nina Schallenberg for the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, with contributions from guest curators Zdenka Badovinac, Eugen Blume, Clémentine Deliss, Natasha Ginwala and Azu Nwagbogu.
“Hello World. Revising a Collection” is a critical inquiry into the collection of the Nationalgalerie and its predominantly Western focus: What could the collection look like today? […] Instead of constructing a linear development of history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, works of the collection provide points of departure for thirteen narratives, which range from the retracing of vestiges of history to the associative intertwinement of thought lines and pictorial worlds.
Although there have been numerous connections between artists from different African countries and Germany as well as within the German art scene, the National- galerie’s collection contains hardly any works by modern or contemporary artists which are related to countries or thematics of the African continent. This exhibition chapter cannot therefore be based on the holdings of the Nationalgalerie. Instead it addresses an issue long neglected by the German public, yet an urgent concern which nonetheless artists have never lost sight of: the violent history of German and European colonialism, through which the histories on both continents are inti- mately bound together.
Its consequences continue to shape the present. Four con- temporary artists in critically re ecting on their own positions reveal the colonial mentalities which are still deeply rooted in today’s minds and o er alternative strat- egies of empowerment (…) By referring to photographs from the colonial past, Joël Andrianomearisoa lays bare the so power but never- theless reckless structure behind the aim to “civilise” one’s counterpart.