A PHANTOM GEOGRAPHY. Cameroon and Congo.
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| free admission |
| 6 years and older |
| Mechanical Arena in the Foyer |
Based on an attic find with photographs and writings of his great-grandfather, photographer and video artist Andréas Lang embarks on a search for traces and an investigation into a lost chapter of German colonial history in Central Africa: a frontier expedition to take possession of the French Congo. This was followed by research in private and public archives and finally journeys to Cameroon, Chad and the Central African Republic. His photographs and videos depict places and landscapes in which the phantoms of the colonial era are still present, in a state of limbo between reality and fiction, past and present. He juxtaposes this with previously unpublished historical material that reflects the unvarnished reality of colonialism.
“Colonialism and imperialism, which form a basis for the asymmetries in our world today, have a lot to do with propaganda—and with arguments that conjure up supposedly positive aspects and prefer to ignore violence and displacement, racism and slavery, famine and colonial wars, exploitation and the destruction of nature and much more. The photographs in this book are a reminder not to do so. Because the legacy of empires is far too complex for hasty answers.”
(Extract from the foreword by historian Benedikt Stuchtey)
Andréas Lang, born in Zweibrücken, began his artistic work in Paris, today he lives in Berlin and works with photography and video installations. His picture cycles deal with landscapes and their hidden history. In 2006-07, he created the series Eclipse about historical landscapes in the Middle East in relation to early Christianity and the Crusades. In 2011, he started a project on colonialism in Central Africa based on research into historical material. In 2019-2021, research trips for the project Re-Visiting Orientalism took him to the Caucasus, North Africa, Central Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. From 2018-2023 he worked on the Broken Memories project about history and memory in Turkey. His work has been exhibited internationally and received numerous awards.
is the curator responsible for the collections of West and Southern Africa at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin. From 2015 to 2021, she was a research assistant in the Department of African Art at the Free University of Berlin. She has been researching and working in West Africa since 2003. Her research focuses on historical, modern and contemporary art and visual culture from Africa and the diaspora, critical museum studies and postcolonial theory. As a curator, she has played a key role in the restitution of cultural artefacts from Cameroon that were illegally exported during the period of German colonialism.
has been a scientific museum assistant in the Africa department of the Ethnologisches MuseumBerlin since July 2024. She is currently working on her doctorate at the University of Augsburg on the re-evaluation of the artefacts from the Lübeck collection Kulturen der Welt, which were collected during the German colonial period, mainly by Günther Tessmann (1884-1969). Her doctoral thesis took her to field research in southern Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
supports the curatorial team of the Africa Department at the Ethnologisches Museum as an honorary guest researcher. As a former professor of African art at various American universities, her field research and publications focus on festivals in the Cross River region in south-eastern Nigeria, their subtle transformation since the colonial era and instrumentalisation as a means of asserting identity in a post-colonial world. An anthology on modern African art was published in 2013 in John Wiley’s Blackwell Companion to Art History series.