The new talk series Deutsche Bank Collection Live – Meet the Artist creates lively and direct access to contemporary art, to its themes and discourses. Participants will have the opportunity to enter into exchange with artists of the collection. The following Meet the Artist events have been taken place so far.

The show The Struggle of Memory features works from the Deutsche Bank Collection and international loans and 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.

Societies require continuity and connection with the past to preserve social unity and cohesion and people need to know where they come from to be able to adjust to the circumstances of the present and challenges of the future. One of the most insidious consequences of the slave trade and European colonialism in Africa was the devaluing and dismantling of precolonial histories and cultures. The African artifacts in Western museums are symbols of the cultures that were robbed of their people and material heritage, ruthlessly subjugated, or gradually hollowed out and disassembled.

Part 2 focuses in how memories are inscribed, featuring artworks that explore in different ways the traces of history all around us while proposing alternative, sometimes subversive strategies of looking at the past. Many of the artists exploit the gap between personal and official narratives, grappling with the precarity of memory and unreliability of history. Drawing our attention to the overlooked, collapsing time through montage, employing humor, dabbling with the absurd, stressing the importance of language in remembering and resisting, and encouraging us to employ all our senses to experience and recall, they explore the slippages between fact and fiction, imaginatively reconstructing connections to the past in the void left by History.

The exhibition features international loans and works from the Deutsche Bank Collection that were acquired over the past ten years. The collection’s global orientation is due in part to the Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, who was a member of Deutsche Bank’s Global Art Advisory Council and directed the groundbreaking documenta 11.

Restitution is only one step in a long journey toward the reconstruction of memory and cultural self-reinvention. Artists are taking other steps, mining family archives, highlighting individual stories, recuperating lesser-known histories, imagining different power dynamics, and constructing alternative narratives.

Curated by Kerryn Greenberg, Independent Curator and Co-Director New Curators