Love and Ethnology – The Colonial Dialectic of Sensitivity (after Hubert Fichte)
October 18, 2019–January 6, 2020
Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)
Love and Ethnology – The Colonial Dialectic of Sensitivity (after Hubert Fichte) is the finale of the multi-year publication and exhibition project Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology, which—in cooperation with Goethe-Institut and several curatorial teams—has passed through stations in Lisbon, Salvador da Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Chile, Dakar and New York since 2017. Based on a critical reception of Hubert Fichte’s writings, the project has initiated a multi-faceted debate on colonial modernism, ethnography, poetry and sexuality. The HKW exhibition is curated by the artistic directors of the multi-year project Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke.
Can the ethnographic gaze be “given back,” restituted? The German writer Hubert Fichte (1935–86) was fascinated by arts and religions of the African diaspora. In the 1970s, he toured cities like Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Chile, Dakar, New York and Lisbon, developing his utopia of a radical sensitivity. This sensitivity would serve research alongside intense surveys, intimacy through (gay) sexuality, self-reflexivity and a condensed poetry of objectivity. Within the context of ethnology and the aesthetic avant-garde of postwar West Germany, the exhibition and research project Love and Ethnology examines Fichte’s writing and takes it as the starting point for new works by contemporary artists on questions of representation and restitution, the unlimiting and canonization of art and the reproduction of colonial power relations.
Artists: Nadja Abt, Heriberto “Eddie“ Alicea, Kader Attia, Gilles Aubry, Richard Avedon, Alvin Baltrop, Gabriel Barbi, Letícia Barreto, Coletivo Bonobando, Michael Buthe, Miguel Rio Branco, Rosemarie Clausen, Nathalie David, Mestre Didi, Hubert Fichte, Claudia del Fierro, Avril Forest, Alair Gomes, Renée Green, Philipp Gufler, Ayrson Heráclito, Isaac Julien, Euridice Zaituna Kala, Kippenberger und Akim S. aus 44, Friedl Kubelka, Pedro Lemebel, Cristóbal Lehyt, Musa Michelle Mattiuzzi, Leonore Mau, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Virginia de Medeiros, Michaela Melián, Mario Navarro, Richard Oelze, Pan African Space Station, Lil Picard, André Pierre, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Daniel Richter, Thierno Seydou Sall, Pap Samb (Papisto Boy), Pierre Verger, James Van Der Zee