Kader Attia: J’Accuse curated by Thomas Köhler and Akinbode Akinbiyi: Being, Seeing, Wandering, curated by Katja Reich

Run by the city of Berlin and situated adjacent to the Jewish Museum in Berlin Kreuzberg, the Berlinische Galerie is a spacious, repurposed, and unassuming white cube structure that collects and presents art made by Berlin-based artists. The works on display date from the late nineteenth century and extend to the present. In the summer of 2024, the gallery showed works by two Berlin-based artists: Kader Attia and Akinbode Akinbiyi.Born in France to Algerian parents eight years after Algeria gained independence, Attia's practice is informed by the multiple legacies of colonialism. Over the past ten-plus years, he has explored the concept of “repair” as an alternative approach to history that does not erase the traces of the past but instead allows after-effects and traumata to come to the fore in the present. In Berlin, the Berlinische Galerie showed his J’accuse from 2016 together with Object's Interlacing from 2020. Entering the exhibition visitors first encountered seven reproductions of Hannah Höch's collage series From an Ethnographic Museum (Fig. 1). The series illustrates the gallery's interest in the social criticism of Höch and other Dada artists exhibited on the second floor of the gallery, but above all forges a connection between Höch's fragmented figures and Kader Attia's installation J’Accuse shown in the next room: a long rectangular space filled with seventeen larger-than-life wooden busts of disfigured faces and eight wooden leg prosthetics mounted on metal stands and facing a twelve-minute segment of Abel Gance's antiwar film J’Accuse, the eponym for Attia's installation (Figs. 2-3). Gance had made the film twice. First, in 1919 as a comment and afterthought on World War I. Then a second time in 1939 as a warning of the looming World War II. The excerpt shown in Attia's installation is taken from the second version, which captured wounded soldiers with “broken faces” (gueules cassées) who initially refused to appear in Gance's first version of the film. For Attia, the prosthetics and facial disfigurements invoke not just the soldiers’ bodily harm and suffering. They also represent the historical and social traumata caused by European colonialism. To make the historical connection explicit, the gallery showed J’Accuse in conjunction with Attia's The Object's Interlacing from 2020. Here, too, a series of sculptures face a video screen (Fig. 4). This time, however, the sculptures are copies of African masks and power figures watching and listening to different comments on the multilayered relationship of repair, restitution, and resistance. As the material of the copies indicates—some are made of wood, some of epoxy coming from a 3D printer—there is no simple answer to these issues. Ambiguity and complexity prevail over authenticity and clarity.In contrast to the Attia's installation, Akinbode Akinbiyi's photography does not have a clear and distinct theme. He often invokes Langston Hughes's autobiography I Wonder as I Wander as his aesthetic motto, thereby pointing to a fundamental curiosity and openness to what life has to offer. What he wonders about is informed by his biography and Blackness. He admires the works of Gordon Parks and Roy DeCarava. But he would resist being reduced to the label “Black photographer.” Born in 1946 in Oxford, England, to Nigerian parents—his father served as mayor of Lagos under colonial administration—Akinbiyi developed an interest in photography early on. But he never formally learned it. That he eventually became a master of it was, from a Yoruba point of view, rather his “destiny” (ori inu). To see and realize it meant embarking on a journey. After his studies of English literature in Ibadan, he moved to Lancaster, England, then to Heidelberg, Munich, and finally to Berlin, where he has resided since the early 1990s. For a long time, he has been at the margins of the art world. Things changed for the better from the 2010s onwards, a development that culminated in July 2024, when the city of Berlin awarded Akinbiyi the prestigious biannual Hannah Höch Lifetime Achievement Prize.The award came with substantial prize money and an extensive exhibition. Under the title Being, Seeing, Wandering, the Berlinische Galerie showed around 120 works made over fifty years. Mounted on different colored walls, they are organized in eight different series: Photography, Tobacco, Sweets, Condoms, and Other Configurations since the 1970s; Sea Never Dry, Bar Beach Victoria Island, Lagos since the 1980s;Lagos: All Roads since the 1980s; African Quarter, Wedding, Berlin since the 1990s; eThekwini, Durban, 1993; Black Spirituality, 2002; Osogbo, 2016; and Portraits (Fig. 5). The word “series” alludes to the idea of a theme or a narrative and, in fact, Akinbiyi takes the word “photography”—writing (graphein) with light (photo)—literally. Stemming from his initial ambition to become a writer, he understands photographs as a form of storytelling. The respective themes are not prefixed but emerge from the location. “Serendipity” is a word he uses often. Images coalesce.You can't plan it. But you can prepare for it. In Akinbiyi's case, his tool is an analog, two-lens middle-format Rolleiflex camera, which allows him to capture the moment he is waiting for. Akinbiyi rejects digital photography just as he generally refrains from color. With the exception of Black Spirituality, all the works on display are in black and white. Captured by the steady frame of the medium square format, we see architecture, posters, traffic configurations, garbage heaps, and passers-by amid an exhausted, frayed infrastructure. But there are also calm and quiet motifs: scenes on the beach, for instance, or the portraits of friends and devotees whose intimacy marks a distinct contrast to the bustling restlessness of his street photography (Figs. 6-8).For Akinbiyi, the photographer has to enter the flow. There is no single moment, just a continuum of moments into which he aims to delve; hence the title: Being, Seeing, Wandering. It's an unobtrusive, almost Zen-like attitude that sets Akinbiyi's work distinctly apart from Attia's visually powerful and demanding agenda. Seeing the works of the two artists in the same space, one wonders how they go together. The curators of the two shows have left the question open. So does the accompanying catalog on Akinbiyi. The omission is not surprising. After all, the presentation of the two artists under the same roof was largely coincidental and not meant as a comparison. What is striking, however, is their shared interest in the aesthetics of the fragment. A markedly different take on that issue, one should add, for where Attia tends to see the fragment as inducing a longing for healing, Akinbiyi seems to accept the futility of such a notion and instead engages with the world as it is.Being, Seeing, Wandering is accompanied by a variety of printed and audio material: The catalogue is edited by Thomas Köhler and Katja Reich, Akinbode Akinbiyi: Being, Seeing, Wandering (Spektor Books, 2024; 252 pp., 100 b/w and 20 color ill., text German/ English, €34,80).In four audiotexts (German and English) Akinbode Akinbiyi talks about his series African Quarter, eThikwini, Sea Never Dry, Lagos: All Roads, African Spirituality and Photography, Tobacco, Sweets, Condoms, and Other Configurations. Each audio comes with a transcript available in German and English (https://berlin-ischegalerie.de/digital/akinbode-akinbiyi/audiotexte/).In a podcast with Thomas Köhler, the director of the Berlinische Galerie, Akinbode Akinbiyi talks in English about his first encounter with photography, the role of urban spaces for his art, and the importance of remaining curious (https://berlinischegalerie.de/podcast/kunst-in-berlin/#c5521).