BERLIN, GERMANY.- Daadgalerie presents Georges Adéagbo - “Tout de moi à tous”, on view 1 July – 25 August 2007. Georges Adéagbo’s installations can remind us of times we take strange pebbles or twigs found on a walk home as a treasure. He gives value to traces humans leave behind unconsciously, considered by most to be trivial, and displays them like an open book. Adéagbo continuously mediates between the different perspectives of his native culture and exhibition locations. His site-specific compositions deal with personal episodes as well as with complex global issues, reaching as far back as European colonialism and exploitation, which in its most extreme form was slavery.
Since September 2006, Adéagbo has been exploring Berlin as guest of the DAAD Artists-in-Residence program. At the daadgalerie he shows the fruits of his research in an exhibition entitled “Tout de moi à tous” and invites the public to create links between different realities. The work gathers together objects found on Berlin flea markets and in thrift shops, urban organs that the artist views as being analogue to our livers and kidneys. His choice displays his sharp sense as an ethnologist of Europe – a reversal of roles!
Invited by the Ulmer Museum , Adéagbo is showing an installation in response to Christoph Weickmann’s seventeenth century collection of miracles (Wunderkammer), which includes many objects from western Africa (2.3.-13.5.2007). It is an artist’s reflection on how Europeans grasped and assimilated the flood of incoming information brought home by explorers, by creating wonder chambers. Returning to this subject, “Tout de moi à tous” gives Berlin a mirror of overlooked perspectives and miracles. It invites viewers to continue their explorations far beyond the categories ‘local’ and ‘foreign’.
Georges Adéagbo was born in 1942 in Cotonou , Benin , and is considered the most outstanding West African artist since his participation at documenta 11. He showed an installation on explorers and the history of exploration with roughly 1500 objects, juxtaposing clichés of Africa and pieces found at the place of showing. The Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art is currently showing one of Adéagbo’s works, which it acquired in November 2006. This exhibition is supported by: Kulturforumsuednord.org e.V.
