The Struggle of Memory - Deutsche Bank Collection
Until March, 2024, the PalaisPopulaire presents The Struggle of Memory, a two-part exhibition featuring works from the Deutsche Bank Collection and international loans. The show reveals the importance of memory in shaping personal and collective identity and the struggle against forgetting in the face of slavery and colonialism and their ongoing effects.
As Milan Kundera writes in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), “the first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history… The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The artists in this exhibition are concerned with remembering, reconstructing, reimagining, and restoring.
Part 1 of The Struggle of Memory focuses on how memories are embodied, presenting artworks that probe in different ways how the body absorbs, processes, stores, and recalls experiences. Part 2 explores how memories are inscribed, bringing together artworks that draw our attention to the traces of history in the natural and built environment while proposing alternative, sometimes subversive strategies of looking at the past.
Curated by Kerryn Greenberg, the exhibition takes as its starting point acquisitions made by Deutsche Bank over the last decade, many of which were created by artists from Africa and/or of African descent. This collecting focus is thanks in part to the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, who directed the groundbreaking documenta 11 and was a member of Deutsche Bank’s Global Art Advisory Council.
Anawana Haloba’s installation Close-Up, 2013–2016, which occupies the central rotunda of the PalaisPopulaire, is the starting point for The Struggle of Memory and will be on view during Part 1 and 2 of the exhibition. In this work, rough-hewn chunks of salt suspended from the ceiling are drip-fed water, which gradually dissolves the salt. The sound of the salty droplets falling into the bowls below punctuates a poetic soundscape which fills the space. Close-Up references human bodily fluids, the precarity of indigenous languages, and the historical importance of salt as a medium of exchange. Many of the artists in this exhibition operate in the gaps between what is known, knowable, and unknowable. Kara Walker, for example, uses slave testimonials and historical novels as starting points, but her works are not intended to be a record of the past. Berni Searle’s fragrant work Traces 1999 points to the body as a vessel for memory, but also to its fragility. Mohamed Camara’s intimate photographs from Certains matins 2006 have a ghostly quality that speak simultaneously to presence and absence. Lebohang Kganye mines the family archive in an attempt to fill in the gaps while Samuel Fosso’s self-portraits offer a playful approach to representation. The works of Toyin Ojih Odutola and Wangechi Mutu with their accumulations of marks and fragments, respectively, allow new narratives to emerge. Finally, Mikhael Subotzky’s video installation Moses and Griffiths, 2012, explores the gaps and exploits the slippages between personal narratives and official histories. Together these works reveal the possibilities of visual storytelling, and the importance of reconstructing connections to the past in the void left by History.
Anawana Haloba
Close-Up, 2013-16
Installationsansicht PalaisPopulaire 2023
Kerryn Greenberg is the Associate Curator of the 14th Gwangju Biennale and Co-Director of New Curators, a paid one-year curatorial training program in London for individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Previously she was Head of International Collection Exhibitions at Tate where, alongside curating major international exhibitions such as Zanele Muholi (2020), Fahrelnissa Zeid (2017), Marlene Dumas (2015), and Meschac Gaba (2013) she was responsible for founding Tate’s Africa Acquisitions Committee.