“You have to do something and then let the others see it and talk about it,” says Georges Adéagbo, explaining his way of working: “Every day when I go for a walk, I find things that have been thrown away and take with me those who talk to me. I tell a story with them.” The Ernst Barlach Haus in Hamburg has now invited the West African artist to enter into a dialogue with the works of the Expressionist sculptor.
It is a kind of birthday present for Adéagbo’s 80th last year, because the artist, who has lived alternately in Cotonou in Benin and Hamburg for many years, has been interested in the work of the North German sculptor and playwright (1870-1938) for a long time. Karsten Müller, director of the Barlach House, had already noticed the Barlach allusions in Adéagbo’s earlier works. This is how the idea came about to let it spread out in the Hamburg museum with its expansive material assemblages without curatorial specifications.
Müller has thus brought a star into the house, because since his participation in the Venice Biennale in 1999 and the Documenta 11 curated by Okwui Enwezor three years later, he has been considered one of the most important contemporary artists from Africa of our time.
For his exhibition “À l’ école de Ernest Barlach, le sculpteur”, the collector, flea market visitor and arranger has drawn from the full: Schlager LPs, popular scientific books about Africa, current newspaper and magazine covers, postcards, dime novels, art books, Barlach Catalogs and publications, maps, souvenirs from Africa, masks and other cult objects form the visual backdrop against which around 50 Barlach works from the museum’s collection are presented.
Among them are such famous wooden sculptures as “The Berserker”, “The Avenger” or “Moses”. Adéagbo simply pinned some found objects to the wall or placed them on the floor of the exhibition room. Others are condensed into new contexts of meaning in showcases or arranged on oriental carpets.
Everything seems to be connected to everything. The assembled objects stand in a variety of relationships to one another: to their producers, to the space and institutional context in which they are exhibited. The all-over narrative ramifications form the humus for Adéagbo’s transcultural messages. On their own, many of these items were of no further importance.
Only through their interaction do they create a complex network that penetrates into the cosmos of the artist: his personal memories, political and social issues and philosophical reflections. Through his specific combinatorics, Adéagbo manages to redefine found spaces again and again. Notions of fluid, transcultural identity and African diaspora appear in it.
This is particularly evident in a series of commissioned paintings that Adéagbo commissioned from advertising painters in his homeland. Starting from postcards, they transferred Barlach sculptures into paintings – including minor translation errors.
In this way, the cosmopolitan Adéagbo contrasts the solemn seriousness, yes leaden heaviness, of Barlach’s sculptures with completely new, refreshing neighborhoods. However, he never fails to show benevolent respect for the life’s work of his artist colleague.
To home page
