A year before Qumran folded, Josef Franz Thiel, the director of Frankfurt’s Museum für Völkerkunde, commissioned the thirty-one-year-old Senegalese artist and activist El Hadji Sy to curate a new collection of Senegalese paintings and works on paper for the museum. I had visited this German ethnographic museum in 1992 when I was preparing the exhibition Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa for the Whitechapel Gallery in London.23 At the time, it was the only institution in Europe that held a considerable number of drawings and paintings by named twentieth-century artists from East, West, and Southern Africa. Sy’s work was seminal in Dakar. He was a founding member of numerous artists’ collectives including the Laboratoire Agit-Art and had pioneered a notorious studio complex in the center of Dakar that was violently disbanded by the Senegalese military in 1983. Sy was renowned for having dedicated ten years of his life to painting with the soles of his feet in reaction to the Senghorian paradigm of visual art and state representation.24 Nineteen eighty-four was not only the year when Sy was commissioned to assemble a collection of contemporary Senegalese painting for the museum, but also the opening of the much-disputed exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art, curated by Kirk Varnedoe for The Museum of Modern Art in New York.25
At the time, this synchronous double take on art and ethnography located both in New York and Frankfurt would have been barely perceived. Whereas the MoMA show pretty much dug its own grave by epitomizing a myopic relationship between African and Western art, the Weltkulturen Museum gave free rein to a Senegalese artist, effectively the first curator from Africa to have worked with a European museum. Aware of the need for serious art-critical reporting on contemporary art practice in Africa, El Hadji Sy also coedited a trilingual anthology on art production in Senegal with a foreword written by Léopold Sédar Senghor, former Senegalese poet-president and close friend of Pablo Picasso and Pierre Soulages. The book also included a text on art criticism in Senegal by Issa Samb, aka Joe Ouakam.26 With Sy’s anthology in hand, I was able to locate him in Dakar and subsequently invite him to become one of the five African cocurators of Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, which opened in 1995. Described by Nigerian novelist and dramaturg Wole Soyinka as “unique in a number of ways,” and the “harvest of a creative journey that began on the African continent,” the exhibition was a complex conflation of modernist painting and post-independence movements, supported by a team approach to curatorial work.27 It was the precursor of subsequent exhibitions and acted as a launch pad for some of its cocurators.28 Today, Sy’s contribution to the history of Senegalese painting and the development of independent artists’ movements in Dakar warrants greater attention, both in terms of academic analysis and regarding his considerable work as a painter. Wilful omission is a procedure no one likes to talk about. It can take on different scales, morphing according to whether it is generated by a politician, an historian, a scientist, a lawyer, a curator, or a journalist. All too often, ethnology and art history work through the medium of omission, provoking consensus through the presupposition of a common reasoning that either extracts something or withholds key dimensions from a narrative.
In 2010, I invited Sy back to Frankfurt to reflect on the collection that he had curated in the eighties, and provide additional and complimentary information to the inventory cards. Because several artists of his generation had died in the interim, this return was fraught with emotional memories. At the time, the person responsible for the museum’s African collections did not adequately record or take notes on Sy’s oral history. This experience would prove an alarming precursor to the widespread resistance to recognize alternative and legitimate meanings generated by artists in relation to a museum’s collection. Several decades following Sy’s pioneering work for the Frankfurt museum, I was able to engage the Afro-German art historian Yvette Mutumba to become the new curator of the museum’s African collection. Her detailed knowledge of contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora outweighed the standard expertise of most ethnographers or area studies specialists. By 2014, Mutumba had identified more than 1,400 works in the museum’s collection, significantly helping to restore the value of individual authorship to a collection that, in its generic taxonomy, had been founded on the disenfranchising discourse of ethnicity. Once more, we invited Sy back to the museum, and with the legacy of Fritz Axt’s art collection that he had inherited and generously lent to the museum, Mutumba and I were able to mount a retrospective of his practice as painter, performance artist, and activist.29 For five years, the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt would become an experiment in venue construction, intended to articulate not only the dissident approach of these earlier countercultural artists and anthropologists, but to consider how new relationships between collections and methods of inquiry might be nurtured by artists within this post-ethnographic institution.
During the first month, I organized a series of internal roundtables with the curators of the regional collections. I was curious to understand their involvement with the university. Were they invited to teach seminars or lecture? Did they have students, or give classes on museum ethnology? I discovered that in Frankfurt the rift between anthropologists at the university and those who worked at the museum was historically and emotionally charged.
From 1925 until the late sixties, every director of this city’s ethnographic museum was automatically the head of the well- endowed Frobenius Institute, which sat within the campus of the prestigious Goethe University in Frankfurt. However, something had gone afoul between the two institutions and, after much acrimony, they were divided. The museum was sidelined to the municipality, like a public knowledge bank and object crypt, whereas the university institute could afford to do pure research, garnering academic accolades and funding with a minimum of teaching or public mediation. Both venues held collections, which had been severed during the divorce. Photographs taken during fieldwork expeditions to Africa, for example, were kept at the university, while the items they related to were stored in the museum’s depot. This separation was unwieldy and only served to stymie any new research into the archives of both institutions.
For Object Atlas. Fieldwork in the Museum, the first exhibition I curated, artist Thomas Bayrle succeeded in extricating works on paper by his father, Alf Bayrle, painted during a collecting expedition to Ethiopia in the nineteen-thirties led by Leo Frobenius and held in his homonymic institute. We exhibited the elder Bayrle’s gouaches and drawings with the original stone steles that had been in the possession of the museum for nearly a century. To move and install these megaliths in the museum gallery involved renting a crane. One can only try to imagine the outlandish schlep incurred to bring these carved effigies to Germany from Ethiopia. These stones, weighing hundreds of kilos each and incised with the traits of different phallic heads, had been uprooted from their respective sites in former Abyssinia and brought to Frankfurt, an extreme act of dislocation comparable to mass identity theft committed by a German provincial city. The memorial presence of ancestors for an entire community had been obliterated and their gravestones uplifted, regardless of what the reverse act might have implied within a Euro-