On Monday, May 18 2015 at 7pm, the art historian Tamar Garb will hold a lecture at C/O Berlin. The lecture ‚Curatorial Conundrums: Encounters with the African Archives‘ takes place on the occasion of the current exhibition ‘The Walther Collection: Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive‘.

In the African Archive of the Walther Collection Tamar Garb combines photographic portraits and figure studies of the late 19th and early 20th century, cartes de visite, postcards, albums and books from the southern and eastern Africa  and puts them into dialogue with contemporary photography and video art by artists who deal with recent anthropological and ethnographic imagery of Africans.

In her presentation Garb rises the question on the historic use of photography, the fictions that underpin them, the power to act of their African subjects, the relationship between photographer and model, and the variety of objects and images that his African archive includes.

Tamar Garb addressed both the poetic dimension of pose and composition, as well as the policies of unequal power relations that are inscribed in most European representations of colonized people and gives the impuls to think about the production of subjectivity and identity.

In the exhibition ‘Distance and Desire’ C/O Berlin presents 100 historical works and 20 works by contemporary artists from the Walther Collection in Neu-Ulm and New York.

Monday, May 18 2015 at 7 pm 

www.co-berlin.org