OBJECT ATLAS – Fieldwork in the Museum

This exhibition presents objects from the Museum’s collections plus new works produced by seven international artists who undertook fieldwork in the Museum during 2011.

Paintings, films, and three dimensional installations by Thomas Bayrle (D), Marc Camille Chaimowicz (UK/F), Antje Majewski (D), Otobong Nkanga (Nigeria), and Simon Popper (UK) are installed in close proximity to objects from Papua New Guinea, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Venezuela, Brazil and Peru. Helke Bayrle (D) and Sunah Choi (Korea) show a film shot in the Museum’s stores that investigates the figurative detail on over one hundred ethnographic artefacts. Historical drawings and photographs of phallic posts made by Alf Bayrle (Thomas Bayrle’s father) on an expedition to Ethiopia in 1934 are exhibited for the first time together with the original funerary steles acquired by the Museum at the same time.

A reading room with archival material from the seminal Frankfurt Qumran Verlag for anthropology and art, plus catalogues and reference books extends the vistors’ own experience of fieldwork in the museum.

The participating artists are present.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue in German and English with unpublished essays by Richard Sennett, Paul Rabinow and the late Hubert Fichte, discussions between Lothar Baumgarten and Michael Oppitz, texts by Clémentine Deliss, Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs, Richard Kuba, Eva Ch. Raabe, Mona Suhrbier, Vanessa von Gliszczynski as well as interviews with the artists who took part in the exhibition. Plus numerous facsimiles of anthropological texts and newspaper cuttings. 500 pages, 250 colour illustrations/photographs, Kerber Verlag, €28.

Weltkulturen Museum, Schaumainkai 29, 60594 Frankfurt am Main