Δ EL HADJI SY: PAINTING, PERFORMANCE, POLITICS

5th March 2015 – 18th October 2015

In the mid-1970s, in a pioneering move, the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt began collecting contemporary artworks from Africa. Today it has over 3000 paintings, prints and sculptures in its collection.

In 1985, the museum commissioned the artist and curator El Hadji Sy (born 1954 in Dakar) with the task of assembling a new group of works of contemporary art from Senegal, thereby initiating a long-term relationship between Frankfurt and Dakar.

Thirty years later, as part of its programmatic investigation into its collection, the Weltkulturen Museum is proud to present a retrospective of El Hadji Sy’s career as a painter and cultural activist whose seminal involvement with the museum preceded the so-called global turn of 1989.

The exhibition, which is co-curated by Philippe Pirotte, director of the Städelschule and Portikus, combines El Hadji Sy’s installations and paintings – sometimes executed with his bare feet or produced on unusual surfaces such as industrial rice sacking or synthetic kite silk – with his selection of ethnographic objects and artworks by colleagues from Senegal. The exhibition includes loans from international private collections in addition to works from the Weltkulturen Museum.

As a founder of the notorious collective Laboratoire AGIT’ART, and a curator of numerous artist-led workshops and studio spaces in Dakar, El Hadji Sy’s interdisciplinary practice represents a ground-breaking position within the context of post-independence Africa.

A comprehensive monograph with unseen archival material, essays and interviews by Hans Belting, Clémentine Deliss, Mamadou Diouf, Julia Grosse, Yvette Mutumba, Philippe Pirotte and Manon Schwich is published by diaphanes in English and German.

In 2016 the exhibition will be on display at the National Galery Prag (Národní galerie v Praze) and at Castle Ujazdowski, Centre for Contemporary Art Warsaw (Centrum Sztuki Wspólczesnej Zamek Ujazdowskizu).

Weltkulturen Museum
Schaumainkai 29
60594 Frankfurt

Tues – Sun, 11am – 6pm, Wed, 11am – 8pm
Entrance: €7 / reduced €3.50

schließen

Δ WILLEM DE ROOIJ

double double

Green Room exhibition

Until 30th April 2015. By application only. Please call 069 212 45115 or write to or ask at the ticket desk in the main museum building.

Three nearly identical blankets are placed in three nearly identical vitrines in three nearly identical exhibition rooms. One of the blankets comes from the Weltkulturen Museum’s ethnographic collection. It was part of a donation in 1834 and was given to the museum in 1904. It is made from tightly woven duck and goose feathers. The design and technique of this rare Californian blanket are repeated – with alterations and variations – in all of the fourteen feathered Californian blankets known to be in existence today.

Two further blankets in the Green Room exhibition are copies commissioned by Willem de Rooij. They are made of camelhair and, in turn, echo the feathered blanket as well as each other. The ethnographic object is spatially sandwiched between its two replicas.

Willem de Rooij has incorporated hand-woven tapestries in his work for over six years. He produces these with Ulla Schünemann, whose workshop near Potsdam, which was established in the 1920s, still uses three hundred year old looms. For Willem de Rooij, these various tapestries connect and cement the different strands within his work. Each new version adds to the growing syntax of the series and becomes part of a family of works.

Willem de Rooij (*1969, NL) is Professor of Fine Arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. De Rooij represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennial in 2005. Major solo exhibitions include Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2010), Kunstverein München (2012) and The Jewish Museum, New York (2014).

Weltkulturen Labor, Green Room, Schaumainkai 37

schließen