Δ Black Paris

Starting in the middle of March 2007 everything in the Museum of World Cultures turns around the interconnection of art and migration. The exhibition “Black Paris. Art and History of a Black Diaspora 1906 – 2006” makes it clear that the Paris of today is not only the largest African enclave in Europe but the undisputed centre of African fashion, music, art and literature. The capital of the former French Colonial Empire is a convenient place to graphically exemplify, in spatially and temporally condensed ways, the processes of cultural and artistic interaction and inter-penetration. These processes are characteristic of North-South-relations transcending the relation of Europe and Africa to include Afro-America and the Caribbean. About every fifth of the approx. 12 million people living in the area of Greater Paris is of African, Caribbean or Afro-American descendency. Their shops, publishing houses, agencies and diaspora initiatives have marked whole quarters of the city. They give the Metropolis of Paris its multicultural flair.

The exhibition takes its start from the colonial expropriation and the invention of “l’art nègre” at the beginning of the 20th century continuing through surrealism, jazz and the negrophilia of the interwar period until the international or intercontinental migrations of the sixties and seventies of the last century. The Museum of World Cultures presents “Black Paris” as the history and iconography of the French-African Metropolis mounted as a collage of historical and documentary images from the archive and of works by modern and contemporary artists.
Responsible for the concept of the exhibition is the Iwalewa - House at the University of Bayreuth.

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Δ Skin Marks – Body Pictures

The exhibition “Skin Marks – Body Pictures”, on display in the main building of the museum from the 29th April, 2006 to September, 2007 shows the human skin as a projection surface for artistic design. Over the last thirty or so years, a renewed general interest in body styling can be determined among the various cultures of the West.

Body modifications comprise a whole range of practices to which belong branding, scarification, implantation, deformations of the skull, the foot binding, beauty operations and body painting. With the discovery of the body as a bearer of sign languages signifying existential orientation and individuality, body interventions have recently experienced renewed acceptance. Especially among the various groupings within youth culture, piercing and tattooing can be expressions of personality but also of group membership. In this connection, recourse to “tribal” models of non-European cultures is especially popular, even though their social and cultural contexts have, for the most part, not been assimilated by such groups.

The exhibition displays examples of tattoos, decorative scarification and body painting from the oceans of Asia, Africa, South America and Europe. The exhibition seeks to describe these in their respective mythological, religious and social contexts. The exhibits, the majority of which are drawn from collections belonging to various Frankfurt museums, are supplemented by an extraordinary range of photographic material.

Five additional museums in the Rhine-Main region, each with their own exhibitions and programmes relating to this thematic complex, will participate at alternating times at both local and regional levels.

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