Isaac Julien features in Love and Ethnology at HKW, Berlin

Can the ethnographic gaze be “given back”, restituted? Within the context of ethnology and the aesthetic avant-garde of post-war West Germany, the exhibition examines Hubert Fichte’s writing and takes it as the starting point for new artistic works on questions of representation and restitution, dissolution of boundaries and canonization, and updating colonial power relations.

From the subcultures in 1960s Hamburg to psychiatric practices in (post-)colonial Senegal, from the polymorphic gender roles in the religions of Candomblé, Vodou and Santería to the onset of the AIDS crisis in the gay community: The exhibition takes up Hubert Fichte’s themes in the places he traveled with his life partner, the photographer Leonore Mau: Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Chile, Dakar, New York and Lisbon.

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Image: Isaac Julien, Mise en scène No.1 (Looking for Langston Vintage Series), 1989/2016