Theo Eshetudocumenta 1410.06. - 17.09.2017
Athener Konservatorium (Odeion)

In spring 2014, Theo Eshetu happened to be filming the Ethnological Museum in Berlin-Dahlem as workers were taking down a banner to prepare the museum façade for the 8th Berlin Biennale. The museum’s collections will be moved to the historic center of Berlin after the controversial reconstruction of the city palace is completed – controversial because the Palace of the Republic, which dates back to GDR times, had to make way for the palace and the connection between the Dahlem collections and German colonial policy will only become more obvious with the planned new installation in an imperial architectural shell.

The banner in question showed five masks and named the five regions represented in the museum’s collection as subtitles: Africa, America, Oceania, Asia, Europe. Just as the graphic design dissected and named the world, the workers cut up the printed plastic film with quick cuts to make it easier to dispose of. The museum became a muse, as Eshetu explained during his visit to Filopappou – the hill of the nine muses of Apollo – in Athens in April 2016. But before the cut-up banner could be disposed of, the artist had saved the material and put it aside for the future, which is now.

Born in London in 1958, Eshetu’s personal take on popular images, even cultural clichés, has captured his imagination since his earliest video works (and his later work for television). His 2002 documentary „Africanized“ combines well-worn visual and aural tropes with the more intimate documentation of a syncretic religious ceremony on Mount Zuqualla in Ethiopia and the Dance Africa Festival in Brooklyn, New York, to reflect on how disparate images of this highly contested continent and its diaspora linger. The filmmaker makes no attempt to logically justify the sequence of disparate scenes, but rather creates a guiding rhythm.

At the time of writing, it is not yet clear how the mask paintings from Dahlem will be incorporated into Eshetu’s work for documenta 14. What is clear, however, is that this flattening and the resulting obscuring of the five continents is a starting point. The artist approaches his weighty themes with a good dose of humor. Thalia, the muse of comedy, has always been his friend. He recently invited other friends and random passers-by into his studio. Images – including fragments of the banner – were projected onto their faces and then recorded on video. What do they say about the city palace, the possibilities of representation and the communicability of a face?

– Monika Szewczyk