Mário Macilau & Malte Wandel: Mashup

Kehrer Galerie presents the photographers Mário Macilau (b. 1984) and Malte Wandel (b. 1982). While Mário Macilau portrays street kids and their life in Maputo, Malte Wandel has been moving on the traces of Mozambicans that were employed in the GDR from 1979 onwards. The confrontation of the works in »Mashup« contextualises them in a new way.

In his series »Growing in Darkness«, published by Kehrer Verlag in 2016, Mário Macilau depicts street kids whose life in Maputo is marked by poverty, violence, and drugs and their yet playful way to deal with this. From 2012 to 2015, Macilau, who used to live on the street himself, repeatedly accompanied the adolescents to learn what they dream about and what influences their life, next to the daily struggle for survival. This is how he managed to create a powerful image that shows that even a hostile environment cannot completely take away fantasy and playfulness out of children’s lifes.

Malte Wandel first published parts of his research on 16,000 Mozambicans that worked in selected businesses of the GDR between 1979 and 1989 in his book »Einheit, Arbeit, Wachsamkeit: The GDR in Mozambique« with Kehrer Verlag in 2012. For ten years, he has been tracing the multiple strings of this part of German history. It is an extensive research project that spans across two continents and two generations and still mostly finds more questions than answers. The exhibition will include photographic works as well as video installations of Wandel.

In addition to this juxtaposition, Malte Wandel will show works from the series »Please don’t smile«, and Mário Macilau from »The Price of Cement« and »Moments of Transition«.

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