DUSSELDORF.- How are cultural and historical processes of transformation reflected in the medium of photography? With more than 500 photographic works from Africa, its diaspora, and Europe, the exhibition “Shifting Dialogues. Photography from The Walther Collection” traces the development of photography as a history of transnational parallels and contradictions: showcasing the beginnings of ethnographic images during the colonial era, self-determined studio photography—and politics of self-fashioning—from the 1940s onwards, and the potent visual activism practiced by a constituency of contemporary artists in the present. The photographic and lens-based media artworks assembled here systematically reveal the ambivalent—and shifting—relationship between image and self-image, portraiture and social identity, representation, and performance. Moreover, the selected works for the exhibition engage with and critically reflect common Western notions of the African continent.
An important point of reference is the 2010 group exhibition “Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity,” curated by Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019) for The Walther Collection. Enwezor, one of the most influential curators of recent decades, utilized the example of portrait photography to illustrate how photographic image production did not always develop in geographically or historically uniform, homogenous ways, but are characterized by multiple ruptures, contrasts as well as intimate dialogues. With his presentation, he emphasized “the conceptual and comparative relationship between different traditions of imagemaking” as well as the unfolding “changes in African identities and subjectivities from colonial to postcolonial modernity.”
For many years, Okwui Enwezor served as an advisor to The Walther Collection. A decade later, the
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen pays tribute to Okwui Enwezor’s pioneering curatorial vision and the extraordinary commitment of the collector Artur Walther. Thanks to their profound contributions toward expanding the cultural history of photography, we are now able to present groundbreaking projects which have hardly been considered within this museum’s discourse until now.
As in “Events of the Self,” and in the exhibition “Distance and Desire” (2013) curated by Tamar Garb, the pathway through “Shifting Dialogues. Photography from The Walther Collection” at K21 is marked by several dialogical juxtapositions—Seydou Keïta and August Sander; Malick Sidibé, J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere and Bernd & Hilla Becher; Santu Mofokeng and Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin—that offer focused time capsules for contemplation. They sketch out the complex interrelationships between unfolding societal transformations, social change, politics of identity, and artistic production. Here, the myriad possibilities of documentary portraiture, the importance of typological, taxonomic, and serial structures for the medium of photography as well as the power – and ambivalent nature – of the photographic gaze are made evident.
Seydou Keïta and August Sander
In the dialogue between Seydou Keïta (1923–2001) and August Sander (1876–1964), socio-cultural differences and similarities of two contrasting mid-twentieth century moments become visible: portraying societies in transition, the postures and gestures adopted by the sitters present them as witnesses and active participants in the writing of collective histories and cross-cultural narratives of transformation. Seydou Keïta portraits, created in his commercial photography studio in Bamako, depict Malian society during a time of change in the years preceding the country’s independence. His formal portraiture style and skillful compositions shaped the new image of (post)colonial Africa and evidence photography’s growing importance as a modern medium of self-expression. To be photographed by Keïta was to be made “Bamakois”: to be seen as beautiful and cosmopolitan. The photographic image became a tool for self-representation, similar to August Sander’s comprehensive cultural study “Face of Our Time.” Photographed during the Weimar Republic, Sander’s visual portrayals depict a variety of occupational groups, genders, and generations—farmers, workers, students, families, tradespeople, artists, and members of the bourgeoisie—highlighting both the individuality of his sitters, as well as typical traits and markers of class and social status.
Malick Sidibé, J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere, Bernd and Hilla Becher
This dialogical presentation of three distinct artistic positions opens up a discursive reflection on conceptual taxonomies, typologies, and seriality—similar to the cross cultural juxtaposition of works by August Sander and Seydou Keïta. Working in Bamako from the 1960s onward, Malick Sidibé (1935/36–2016) became a chronicler of his time and its people, celebrating a newly emerging identity in postcolonial Mali in the years following its independence: inside nightclubs and on the shores of the Niger, he documented self-confident young people dancing and partying; in his portrait studio, he photographed cosmopolitan citizens from all walks of life. The sitters in his intimate series “Vues de Dos” either turn away from the camera or glance back, returning the viewers’ gaze without compromising their agency or autonomy. J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere’s (1930–2014) archive of more than 1000 photographs of Nigerian women’s sculptural hairstyles converge cultural traditions and everyday practices: his typological studies, created during the 1970s, meticulously document the intricate craft of hair braiding as a symbol of collective memory, pride, and national identity. Contemporaneously in Germany, Bernd (1931–2007) and Hilla Becher (1934– 2015) began to methodologically document disused architectural structures and abandoned industrial buildings: water tanks, gas cylinders, and winding towers were ordered according to type, and arranged into grids to emphasize their function, structural form, and original purpose.
Santu Mofokeng, Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin, and ethnographic photography
The juxtaposition of Santu Mofokeng’s (1956–2020) and Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin’s (1874–1954) differing perspectives offers a confrontational, profound reflection on the early history of portrait photography in South Africa, through a dialogue between ethnographic and contemporary visual enquiry. Mofokeng’s slide projection “The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950” features a collection of private photographs commissioned by Black working- and middle-class families during colonial rule in the late 19th and early 20th century. Mofokeng annotates these vernacular images with biographical details, names, and provocative questions about the nature of representation and the photographic gaze, thus contemplating the conditions, sensibilities, and aspirations of South Africa’s Black population in their desire for recognition. When juxtaposed with Duggan-Cronin’s eleven illustrated volumes “The Bantu-Tribes of South Africa” (1928–54), the latter’s ethnographic and anthropological photographic stance becomes evident; here indigenous South African tribes are documented as systematic groupings and presented as nameless ‘types.’ This ambivalence between Duggan-Cronin’s photographs as products of a racist colonial ideology and the subjectivity and agency of Mofokeng’s collection invites new readings of the past: in contrast to the obsessive classification in Duggan-Cronin’s work, Mofokeng’s taxonomic gesture offers a visual counter archive beyond colonial administration, governance, and categorization.
Moreover, studio portraits from South and East Africa created between 1850 and the early 20th century are exhibited. Widely circulated in the form of cartes-de-visite, postcards, and albums, they were popular in Europe during the colonial era: as cheap, mass-produced photographs, they demonstrate the power of the visual image and the various pictorial strategies deployed to create ‘native’ stereotypes about Africa, which soon entered Western collective imagination. The selection comprises a range of different motifs and genres of portrait photography: from figurative representations of both anonymous and named individuals, to ethnographic ‘types’—mothers, warriors, hunters—to comparative studies, and ambiguous projections of fantasy and myth.
The historical dialogues are accompanied by queer performative portraits by the late Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955–89) as well as conceptual bodies of works by contemporary artists such as Yto Barrada, Samuel Fosso, Sabelo Mlangeni, Zanele Muholi, Mwangi Hutter, Grace Ndiritu, and Berni Searle. Characterized by visual activism, social critique and subversive politics, the works––produced largely in the early 2000s––question prevalent concepts of the (black) body and break with conventional gender binaries, while challenging cultural appropriation and structural racism. This presentation brings together a constituency of contemporary artists who use photography to investigate the emancipatory, liberating possibilities of portraiture and self-representation. Photography here becomes a mode to challenge dominant power structures, and a democratic tool to articulate new subjectivities. These thematically diverse, and often serial, bodies of works subversively question binary concepts of gender and cultural identity, oscillating between objective representation, performance, and staged photography. Contemporary artists included in the presentation have explored the body as a contested site for the staging––and mapping –– of difference: as an expression of economic, cultural, and social inequalities; as a “weapon” against societal constraints and binaries; and as a testament to alternative sexual and gender identities. Photography becomes a performative practice of embodiment, for indigenous and Afro-diasporic visual meditations on integrity, transformation, and representation.
The photographic works of Theo Eshetu, David Goldblatt, Santu Mofokeng, Jo Ractliffe, Mikhael Subotzky, and Guy Tillim focus on the human habitat, the built environment, the dense structures of inner cities, or the vast, empty landscape. Architecture is pictured as a symbol of social order, of utopian failure, of shattered aspirations of freedom and self-realization. Collectively, the photographs on view represent psychological studies of liminal social spaces, hybrid identities, geopolitical shifts, and (post)colonial conflicts. Mofokeng’s and Eshetu’s respective works convey religious, spiritual, and secular sentiments. The photographs by Ractliffe and Goldblatt act as testaments to memories, reflections of individual and collective histories, and inscribed ideologies. They show the reverberations of violence—of war, oppression, colonial subjugation—on the contemporary landscapes of South Africa and Angola. The works are inscribed with traces of (post)colonial and (post)industrial conflicts as well as testimonies to collective memory and spirituality.
The voices of a younger generation of artists are represented in more recently acquired works by Edson Chagas, Em'kal Eyongakpa, François-Xavier Gbré, Délio Jasse, Lebohang Kganye, Mimi Cherono Ng'ok, Mame-Diarra Niang, and Dawit L. Petros. They contemplate the effects of socio-cultural, economic, and political changes in the present; and creatively explore the influence of capitalist systems on urban environments, collective memory, and politics of migration. Their practice reflects a contemporary paradigm shift in post- and decolonial discourses, offering insights into the present possibilities and complex thematics of contemporary photography from an Afro-diasporic perspective that is at once plurivocal, subjective, and critically engaged.
The exhibition is curated by Maria Müller-Schareck and Vivien Trommer, and conceived in close collaboration with The Walther Collection, supported by curatorial consultant Renée Mussai.
