"Opacity" begins with a film/video programme on the headscarf controversy that I presented in 2007 at the invitation of the conference "De/ Constructions of Occidentalism" at the Humboldt University in Berlin. The programme with the title "Nichts Zeigen" (Show Nothing), which I have since developed further in various versions, is being revisited here. The starting point was to understand the headscarf controversy as an image controversy, in which it was a question of Christian "showing" vs. Islamic aniconism, of the tension between transparency and the veil. I was interested in an examination of a regime of gaze and image instead of a 'direct' or explicit confrontation with the headscarf and veil. With "Opacity", I would now like to address the already existing questions of recognition, representation, clandestinity and (political) subjectivity and the perspective of migration. With works by Oliver Husain, Steffen Köhn, Basma AlSharif, Maya Schweizer and others.
Nanna Heidenreich

Using the example of the collector Reinhard Klimmt, whose collection of African art was exhibited in St. Petersburg and Osnabrück in 2010, the article examines the European-Western staging of classical African sculptures and their significance for the collector-subject. The aim is to clarify the role played by the longing for the 'authentic other'. In the course of the Osnabrück exhibition, there was a scandal because the collection contained numerous forgeries - according to the accusation launched in the media. This article is less concerned with the authenticity of individual exhibits than with the connection between the cultural-historical emptying of meaning of the cultural artefact and its subsequent identity-creating overwriting.
Melanie Ulz

Against the background of my own video works and research on (anti-)colonial heritage and (anti-)colonial memory, the article develops reflections on the question of what constitutes a document in itself and what testimony it is able to bear about an event or a situation in the context of oralité (oral tradition) and the "colonial library" (V. Y. Mudimbe), which has constituted 'Africa' as an object of knowledge. In contrast to the attempt, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, led by a mal d'archive, to restitute the history of Africa in an African, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist perspective, my question, modified for a contemporary artistic context reformulated from Europe and interested in transversalisation, is: How can testimony be mobilised and thus actualised? What would a cinéma militant be under postcolonial conditions?
Brigitta Kuster

Artists have repeatedly addressed the colonial overhang of ethnological museums - starting with Hannah Höch in the 1920s/30s, Lothar Baumgarten in the 1960s, Isaac Julien in the 1990s and not least Wendelien van Oldenborgh or Kader Attia in 2013. In Isaac Julien's work, this repressed history actually appears in the form of a ghost. The lecture will focus on the more recent works and the question of which discourse and which identity politics these works address. This question arises in the course of current talk of a global art that hardly takes the inequality of history into account at all. Therefore, according to the hypothesis, such works can hardly be discussed without questions of identity politics and local reception, however controversial the concept of identity and the restriction to regionality may be. At the same time, the question arises as to what extent art advocates equality while taking historical rifts into account.
Susanne Leeb