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.

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

The Struggle of Memory Part 1: April 19 – September 18, 2023
The Struggle of Memory Part 2: October 6, 2023 – March 11, 2024