Exhibit A: “A meditation on the dark history of European Racism in relation to Africa”

Steven Afrikaner in the "subtly lit golden glow" of Trophies from Eden

Exhibit A: Deutsch Sudwestafrika, a ‘human installation’,by Brett Bailey, will be presented at the Wiener Festwochen in Vienna and at the Theaterformen in Braunschweig in May and June.

Exhibit A: Deutsch Sudwestafrika is South African theatre maker Brett Bailey’s uncompromising new human installation about colonialism, racism, xenophobia and genocide. In this piece he brings together three threads: the human zoos of the European Imperial Era that helped construct the racist fictions that legitimised colonial policies; the genocide of the Herero and Nama in Namibia under German colonial rule; and the current rise of racism and strong-arm policy towards immigrants in Europe.

The clay daubed heads of members of a Nama choir in Dr Fischer's Cabinet of Curiosities

A pivotal motif of the work is human skulls: several hundred of these were gathered from deceased prisoners of war in the forced labour camps in which thousands of Herero and Nama were starved and worked to death by the German colonial administration. Anthropologists measured these skulls against those of white people to ‘prove’ that the ‘primitives’ were of a lower evolutionary order, and that appropriating their land, destroying their cultures and reducing them to servitude was justifiable. Today, a century later, tens of thousands of skulls of the ancestors of the people of the free world are still held in the underground vaults of the museums and universities of their former colonial masters. Exhibit A will be installed in the 100 year-old Museum of Ethnography in Vienna, Austria.

Bailey will be working with ten performers from Namibia, whom he met on a research trip there in March, as well as the South African actress Chuma Sapotela, eight African immigrants living in Europe, and eight of their children. The work takes the form of a series of dioramas in which many of the performers are installed in glass museum cases in scenes that unpack the twisted history of racism - sure to push the buttons of PC Europeans.

For information and images see:

Mail & Guardian, June4 to 10 2010, Resisting the muses of imperial ‘science

Real Review, Photos of Exhibit A: Deutsch-Sudwestafrica Installation by Brett Bailey

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