ANNA DASOVIĆ (*1982 in Amsterdam, NLD, based in Rotterdam, NLD)

(Re)Producing “Antonius Guilielmus Amo Guinea-Afer” as biography as body. An exercise in unlearning, 2020


Anna Dasović’s practice aims to represent bodies of knowledge. She presents exhibition scenarios that are preceded by intensive research including interviews and archival/ bibliographic research. By reorganizing, and recontextualizing knowledge, Dasović highlights rhetorical structures in which violence and power are inscribed. This reinterpretation of existing material addresses how the concealment of such conflicts is ideologically motivated.

In her response to the exhibition’s invitation, Dasović has focused on the narration of Anton Wilhelm Amo’s life, checking their sources and comparing them against each other. What counts as reliable testimony? What counts as subjective interpretation or speculation? Dasović compares the patchiness of Amo’s biography with those of other academic figures of his era. She reveals that history as a social construction is marked with processes of narrative erasure, and this erasure is most intense when the historical subject is non-white. Further, she proposes that the tacit and racist censorship of Amo’s life and work undermines historical factuality. By probing apparently credible sources that appear, on first inspection, to provide information about Amo, Dasović provokes further questions to arise. With (Re)Producing “Antonius Guilielmus Amo Guinea-Afer”, Dasović highlights historical aporias into which she poses unanswered questions around Amo’s biography and body that invite the visitor in a process of unlearning. As an artistic approach free of utopian wholeness, or, free of the expectation to undo the erasure Amo and others in his position have suffered, Dasović’s work centers on revealing uncertainties about history produced by racism.

Dasović’s gesture takes shape in a regular cycle in which she renders or makes these aporias visible by posing questions for the duration of the exhibition. While these questions are installed on the windows of the exhibition rooms of the Villa Salve Hospes as simultaneous retrospects and prospects, visitors can also encounter them online in pop-up windows on the Kunstverein's website, thus Thinking With, Through and by Anton Wilhelm Amo. Dasović brings attention to the invisible: the glass or the (pop-up) window between that which is on the surface (history) and that which is underneath that surface (everything and everyone else).

LUNGISWA GQUNTA (*1990 in Port Elizabeth, ZAF, based in Amsterdam, NLD)

Benisya Ndawoni: Return to the Unfamiliar, 2020
Razor-wires, sage, mpepho
Variable dimensions


Even before entering the room, Lungiswa Gqunta’s installation Benisya Ndawoni: Return to the Unfamiliar announces itself with the spicy-bitter scents of sage and dried mpepho, a liquorice strawflower cultivated in South Africa. In combination with the geometric barbed wire room drawings – harshly opposing the visitors in one moment while creating almost intimate retreats in the next – an equal appeal is made to the senses of sight, touch and smell. This multi-sensory approach establishes interesting links to the theses of Anton Wilhelm Amo, who noted in The Apatheia of the Human Mind: “Man has sensation of material objects not as regards his mind but as regards his organic and living body.”[1]

Important starting points of the installation are experiences of forced migration: the controlled or forced movement of (Black) people in the past and present. “Where were you going?” asks the title in siXhosa, posing questions about accessibility and structural violence. “Benisya Ndawoni: Return to the Unfamiliar remembers all the homeless and therefore invisible bodies trying to find a home, and the violence inflicted upon them during this navigation. It is a tribute to migration, to the many houses that have been built and destroyed and which in turn build ‘houses’ within ourselves.” (Lungiswa Gqunta) By directly linking sage, mpepho and barbed wire, Gqunta evokes contradictory memories of private retreats, but also of exclusion and persecution. Ambivalent desires for belonging meet the disoriented flow of bodies through different places and contexts – a phenomenon for which Georg Lukács coined the metaphor of transcendental homelessness. With the additional title – Return to the Unfamiliar – Gqunta also refers to the movement of Amo, who, in 1746/47, returned to the place from which he was forcibly abducted as a child and who knew how to draw the qualities of his multi-logical philosophy from integrating different frames of reference.

[1] Amo, Anton Wilhelm: The Apatheia of the Human Mind. In: Antonius Gvilielmus Amo Afer from Axim in Ghana. Translation of his works. Halle (Saale), 1968, p. 73.

BERNARD AKOI-JACKSON (*1979 in Accra, GHA, based in Kumasi, GHA)

... and we, seeking to remember the roads that lead us back home, get strayed into the essences that will emerge ..., 2020


... and we, seeking to remember the roads that lead us back home, get strayed into the essences that will emerge... is an enigmatic film / installation / performance script that initiates a search by the fictitious character Amo to retrace his steps to his origins. It is an experimental process (based on Anton Wilhem Amo, Afer). The search of this character becomes the ritual that guides the flow of the piece. As the public goes through the materials made available; as they go through the motions that point to an unearthing of facts and legend, and eventually engage in a conversation with the artist, it is possible to collectively inscribe a story of one who has been shrouded in a lot of silence.

– BERNARD AKOI-JACKSON

PATRICIA KAERSENHOUT (*1966 in Den Helder, NLD, based in Amsterdam, NLD)

While we were Kings and Queens, 2020
12-part series, digital print on Hahnemühle paper, wooden boards with text, hammer
100 × 70 cm (Prints) / 42 × 29,7 cm (Wooden plates)


The title While we were Kings and Queens refers to the fact that highly developed cultures existed on the African continent long before the Europeans established the transatlantic slave trade. Up until today there is the notion that Black people’s history started when Europeans set foot on African shores. In 1712 – the same year that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born – Willy Lynch gave an infamous speech to slave owners in the colony of Virginia, sharing his methods of oppressing Black slaves. The term ‘lynching’ is derived from his name. A basic principle of the Enlightenment says that knowledge is more important than origin. Everyone is born as a ‘tabula rasa’ (empty sheet) and gains knowledge and experience during their life. Everyone has the same start; accordingly, everyone deserves the same opportunities for emancipation and democratic living conditions.

For the exhibition pieces I have printed images of proud and beautiful Black and Brown people on pages of a book called The European Enlightenment: Zeitalter der Aufklärung, published in 1976. The book gives an overview of the European and German Enlightenment and provides insight as well as historical context to Amo’s life and work. This particular book was part of my 2017 performance Daughter of Diaspora with students of the Decolonial Summerschool in Middelburg. Some of the pages contain angry texts and remarks by the Black and Brown students, whose ancestors were not considered here. I am fascinated by Wilhelm Amo’s ideas concerning the body and the mind, where he says that the mind cannot feel pain. It is only the body that can perceive pain. Willy Lynch’s speech, excerpts of which accompany the prints in the exhibition, shows how the brain can invent immense cruelties because it is decoupled from the body. With While we were Kings and Queens, I also want to show the white psychoses in which Black and Brown bodies are trapped. A psychosis that on the one hand has promoted emancipation and equality, but on the other hand is responsible for terrible crimes. The sentences from Willy Lynch’s speech thus stand in sharp contrast to the German Enlightenment texts and the philosophy of Anton Wilhelm Amo.

– PATRICIA KAERSENHOUT

THEO ESHETU (*1958 in London, GBR, based in Berlin, GER)

Amo Speaks, 2020
4K Video
5:38 min


Filmmaker and video artist Theo Eshetu traces the collective unconscious, using symbols and signs to question cultural identities and media narratives. In Amo Speaks, a newly developed video work for Kunstverein Braunschweig, he develops a fictive portrait of Anton Wilhelm Amo as a speculative and performative attempt to evoke a visual memory of him and thus also point both to the absence of any verified portrait and to the presence of many projections and faked representations of Amo that circulate online, in books, and writing.

In Amo Speaks, images of Amo are projected onto the face of a performer. Text fragments from Anton Wilhelm Amo’s reflections on the body-mind problem and the faculty of sensing are read aloud in English, German, and Latin to create a sound texture that makes tangible the multi-perspective position from which Amo developed his thoughts.

“Through the combination of a real person and the popularly projected image of Amo I try to create a real image which is clearly not real, alluding to the mask we all wear in real life.” (Theo Eshetu)

JEAN-ULRICK DÉSERT (*in Port-au-Prince, HTI, based in Berlin, GER)

“Paradisum Calamitate” (Paradise Catastrophe) after C.D.F., 2020
Acrylic on parchment, easels, Monstera deliciosa
Variable dimensions

Guten Morgen Preußen, 2009
6 cyanotypes on Bütten-Ingres paper

1. Morgensglück, 31 × 48 cm
2. Vater Sohn vor Wasser Pyramiden, 24 × 31 cm
3. Preußisches Schicksal, 24 × 31 cm
4. Reflexionsbecken, 24 × 31 cm
5. Mother Delta, 31 × 48 cm
6. Guten Morgen Preußen, 29,7 × 42 cm

Jean-Ulrick Désert’s installation “Paradisum Calamitate” (Paradise Catastrophe) after C.D.F., developed especially for the exhibition, combines tropical plants with large parchment strips embellished with acrylic. It invokes The Wreck of Hope (Das Eismeer) by Caspar David Friedrich, a key work of German romanticism. The tragedy depicted by Friedrich is re-imagined as a metaphorical shipwreck of a lost saga. Désert’s implicit narrative is intentionally ambiguous, creating a broken image of a fictional history that points in several directions.

Désert contextualizes the story hinted toward in the installation with recognizable symbols and motifs: patterns reminiscent of church windows, a book depicting Amo as the mythical Janus, coats of arms and title plates & bands with wilting ‘black’ tulips considered and commodified as rarities, and a mystical looking shipwreck that, as an (art) historical metaphor, evokes both Germanic providence and Germany’s colonial complicities. Also on display in the Spiegelsaal is Guten Morgen Preußen, a series of analog cyanotypes in Prussian blue on Bütten-Ingres paper and generated with digitally collaged negatives. This series of works narrates the story of Sabac el Cher, a boy from Egypt who was ‘gifted’ to Prince Albrecht of Prussia in the 19th century and lived at his court in Germany. The series comprises Morgensglück, a portrait of Gertrud (née Perlig) and Gustav Sabac el Cher at the Muskau Park in then-Prussia, Vater Sohn vor Wasser Pyramiden, a superimposed portrait of August Sabac el Cher and his son Gustav, Preußisches Schicksal showing Gustav Sabac el Cher and the German Emperor on horseback, Reflexionsbecken, a portrait of August Sabac el Cher in Prince Muskauer Pückler’s gardens, and Mother Delta, a depiction of Anna and her future husband August Sabac el Cher. This project serves as an echo of the conspicuous presence of Africans among the German ‘Adel’ class.

OLIVIER GUESSELÉ-GARAI (*1976 in Paris, FRA, based in Berlin, GER)

Their eyes were watching cop, 2015/2020
Mixed media, wood
Variable dimensions


Olivier Guesselé-Garai lends poetic expression to his FACULTY OF SENSING – Thinking With, Through, and by Anton Wilhelm Amo contribution. In a poem written in 2015, the artist deals with the cross-generational identity issues of a “race of doubt”(Olivier Guesselé- Garai). Here too connecting social injustice in different times, Guesselé-Garai explicitly refers with the title of his poem to the literary work Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937, by Zora Neale Hurston, a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance in 1920s New York. With the orthographically close shift from “God” to “Cop”, the artist transports the same old questions – with regard to Anton Wilhelm Amo even centuries-old questions – into the very present, allowing for references to movements like Black Lives Matters, which have been formed against sys-temic (police) violence against Black People of Color (BPoC).

For the exhibition, the artist translates what he has written into space. In the horizontal presentation, different materials are combined and what is read is repeatedly linked with what is seen, thus generating a top view as the superordinate perspective on things. The wooden letters fixed to panels show traces of other floor coverings and can be read together with individual statements of the poem: “uptown or downtown tonic asphalt”. The first line, “A negro way of running”, opens up different connections yet again as a reference to Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s epilogue for Hurston’s novel, A Negro Way of Saying. Guesselé-Garai develops an individual type-image with universal appeal. The typeface in the sense of typography is simply designed and thus bears signs of universality too. The letters have something educational about them, they are reminiscent of a basic learning tool for reading and writing. With their help, knowledge can be grasped, shared and stored over time – and ultimately, they also provide access to those writings by Amo which are existing today. Divided into four paragraphs, the flow of reading in Guesselé-Garai’s poem is marked as interrupted, thus also referring to historically re-curring and continuing incisions: an ongoing fragile history.

ANTJE MAJEWSKI (*1968 in Marl, GER, based in Berlin, GER)

Die Apatheia der menschlichen Seele (I–IV), 2020

I
Oil on wood
40 × 80 cm

II
Oil on wood
77,8 × 77,8 cm

III
Oil on wood
50 × 50 cm

IV
Oil on wood
73 × 50,5 cm


On the first floor of the rotunda Antje Majewski presents new paintings created especially for the exhibition. Majewski’s series of works is based on Anton Wilhelm Amo’s dissertation of the same name, written at the University of Wittenberg in 1734: On the Apathy of the Human Mind; or, the Absence of Sensation in the Human Mind and its Presence in our Organic and Living Body. In his dissertation Amo explores the body-mind problem and posits the following with regard to the debate at the time: “that the mind acts with the body with which it is in mutual union, we concede; but that it suffers with the body, we deny”[1].

Majewski also begins with this idea of the sanctity of the soul and examines the relationship between the internal and the external, our inner soul and our outer body. The final form of the series is painting, but each work has gone through a process of translation several times in the course of its creation. This is not only in the sense of Amo’s original Latin text being translated into a contemporary language version, but more in terms of how Amos’ writing conjured notions and individual ideas about the depiction of a soul, which were then shared in a dialogue using spoken language, and then finally translated into a visual language. The paintings are inscribed with the artistic interpretation of previous discussions with the people involved in the exhibition about the visual representation of a soul, which rendered the challenges of speaking the unspeakable and painting the un-paintable visible. Translated into writing, transcriptions of these conversations – in the different languages in which the conversations took place – accompany the pictures as texts, thus establishing an additional layer to the image-text relationship.

Presented on the upper level of the rotunda on pedestals from the Villa Salve Hospes, the works also become portraits in terms of their presentation format; portraits of those who were involved in the dialogue around the creation of the exhibition project and Majewski’s works. Ultimately, the paintings can also be interpreted as portraits of Anton Wilhelm Amo himself, whose philosophical vocabulary is the inspiration for the entire exhibition.

[1] Amo, Anton Wilhelm: The Apatheia of the Human Mind. In: Antonius Gvilielmus Amo Afer of Axim in Ghana. Translation of his works. Halle (Saale), 1968, p. 73.

CLAUDIA MARTÍNEZ GARAY (* 1983 in Ayacucho, PER, based in Amsterdam, NDL)

Muy blanco para indio y muy poco para blanco / Too white for a cholo, not enough for a white man, 2020
Clay painting (clay on cotton canvas)
155 × 500 cm


“The prejudice of platitude is that the new is neither to be sought nor set out; rather, it is safest to follow the old. Note: This prejudice will be countered 1) by comparing the old with the new, 2) by investigating everything until all doubt is eradicated, 3) by not mistrusting one’s own strength too much, but by doing as much as one can.” [1]

In her artistic work, Claudia Martínez Garay explores symbolic translations of exoticization, resentment, and the schizophrenic perception of indigenous peoples of the Andes. While cultural artifacts from the Incas shape the region’s ethnographic and visual memory, their descendants are still exposed to various forms of racism in the present. The starting point of the newly created work Muy blanco para indio y muy poco para blanco/ Too white for a cholo, not enough for a white man (2020) is this line from the film Túpac Amaru, in which Amaru – the last Inca monarch and fighter against the Spanish invasion in the sixteenth century – defines his own identity as mestizo. “His body and soul was as brown as white, Amaru himself was the embodiment of the contradictions, and the gathering of the two worlds that until this moment cannot recognize and reconcile themselves as Peruvian inhabitants”. (Claudia Martínez Garay) Like Anton Wilhelm Amo, Amaru was affected by discrimination, Christianization, and colonization; like Amo, Amaru spoke Latin fluently, among other languages, and so both sought to use their means to revolt against colonial oppression and a lack of acceptance. The installation is based on historical and current representations from textbooks, museum catalogues, and archaeological journals. The illustrations have been reproduced in various shades of clay. Combined, they form a kind of mental map in which a variety of systems of symbols and images, ideas and ideologies enter into new relationships and address the prevalent mechanisms of exclusion and the representation of power. In doing so, Martínez Garay investigates how a canon of images influences cultural identity and which new compositions can be used to speculate about alternative historiographies and future utopias.

[1] Amo, Anton Wilhelm: Treatise on the Art of Philosophizing Soberly and Accurately. In: Antonius Gvilielmus Amo Afer of Axim in Ghana. Translation of his works. Halle (Saale), 1968, p. 191f.

KONRAD WOLF (*1985 in Neubrandenburg, GER, based in Berlin, GER)

Anton Wilhelm Amo Center, 2020
www.kunstvereinbraunschweig.de


As part of his final thesis for his architectural studies, Konrad Wolf was in 2016 tasked with planning a redesign of the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel. Rather than taking the obvious option of an architectural sketch, he developed an idea for the Anton Wilhelm Amo Center – a place that could be located anywhere in the world, dedicated for a defined time to the critical examination of hegemonic knowledge. The name of Amo, early philosopher of the German Enlightenment, was chosen for this planned temporary space for reflection and its program. His scholarly status within European philosophy has been and remains suppressed, ignored, and at best remembered as a curiosity. But buried at it may be, it may be his work that provides a key to better understanding of European Enlightenment philosophy, marked as it was by extreme contradiction and racism.

Given that Anton Wilhelm Amo grew up at court in Wolfenbüttel, certainly used the Herzog August Library located there and likely attended the knight academy, we must post the question of why Amo remains largely unknown in the Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel region. As an institution, why does Herzog August Bibliothek still fail to pay adequate tribute to him? And, as a more fundamental question, why are some people remembered and others not? And not least, how can an institution play an active role in our memorial culture? Together with activists from the Amo – Braunschweig Postkolonial group, Konrad Wolf has developed two public workshop events for the supporting program. As well as interrogating the historical circumstances in which Amo has been rendered invisible, there will be discussions of the imperative for and possibilities of visible memory. For the duration of the exhibition, Konrad Wolf has renamed the Kunstverein Braunschweig the Anton Wilhelm Amo Center via an intervention on the organization’s website. Wolf’s concept thus fits seamlessly into an exhibition dedicated to Anton Wilhelm Amo. At the same time, the mere act of temporarily renaming the entire institution that is Kunstverein Braunschweig to Anton Wilhelm Amo Center goes far beyond the exhibition and its title, calling fundamental institutional structures into question. This (minimal) uncertainty, even merely at the level of language, already touches at the question of the immense power of calling things by their name – or not doing so.