Rebecca Pokua Korang’s practice blends performance and body work with multimedia art, protest documentation, spoken word, and everyday materials, combining them to tell stories about cultural specificity. A Berliner, the artist addresses her community’s concerns regarding racial profiling, police brutality, and state surveillance, foregrounding them against the background of a contemporary new right movement as well as longer histories of oppression and othering. Verwoben & Vergessen (2023) is a testimony to the violence inherent in acts of erasure, as it brings together photographs of Ghanaian colonial prisoners of war, propaganda material of the 1940s, and lace fabric reminiscent of the curtains that were popular at the time, and continue to adorn many a grandparent’s window. The fabric metaphorically shrouds the gaze of those who chose to avert their eyes from genocide. We are here, Korang’s work seems to say, because white Germans were there, because racist fantasies and exoticisms animated colonial expansion and bolstered the National Socialist belief in hierarchies of humanity. However, Korang’s work does not insist on the separability of her experience from the ‘German’ one, it rather invites in a pluriversal perspective in which her own heritage is entangled. This tender sentiment of togetherness in the face of lost innocence manifests itself in the Ghanaian fisher’s sponge, which is intricately woven into the frumpy German lace.

Work in the exhibition: Verwoben & Vergessen (2023), textile, 1-channel-video, 10’ 22”. Courtesy of the artist