Dekoloniale Berlin Residents

In May 2024, a jury selected five artists who developed occasion- and site-specific artistic works as part of the joint decentralised exhibition “Dekoloniale – what remains?!” by Dekoloniale Memory Culture in the City and the Stadtmuseum Berlin.

The artworks are on display at the Museum Nikolaikirche, as well as in the Dekoloniale project space at Wilhelmstraße 92, in the “African Quarter” in Berlin-Wedding, and at the “Afrikanische Straße” underground station.

Rooted in research translated into practice, Tonderai Koschke’s work focuses on post-colonial identities and power dynamics in the built environment. Inspired by the material cultures and architectural heritage of the home she grew up in, Zimbabwe, she explores traditions disrupted by colonialism. This led her to investigate the historical and spiritual significance of the monumental stone city ruin, Great Zimbabwe, and the practice of building with stone in Sub-Saharan Africa. She views learning about the past in all its complexity as a launchpad for imagining alternative presents and decolonial futures.

The foundation of Percy Nii Nortey’s art practice is collaboration with various proletariat community members in Ghana, including car mechanics, charcoal sellers, and market women. He uses fabric stained from their daily work to reflect their labor and essence. By distributing fabric to workers and later collecting it stained with oil, fuel, and dirt, he transforms these materials, charged with personal histories, into proxies for collective memory. His  approach actively engages the local community, fostering connections, and reshaping perceptions to highlight the importance of their labor in society, thus contributing to the decolonization of minds.

Through multimedia installations, sculptures, paintings and collaborative performances Theresa Weber seeks to challenge existing power hierarchies and fixed categorizations. Often referring to site-specific historical research and ancient mythologies, she develops collages of cultural materials from a de-colonial lens. Her perspective as a German born artist with Jamaican, German and Greek background influences her artistic approach. She exemplifies the constant transformation within diasporic traditions, referring to theories of Caribbean Discourses, as mostly to Édouard Glissant´s writings.

Charlotte Ming and Yangkun Shi’s collaborative work brings to light the obscured history of German colonialism in China through an interdisciplinary approach combining photography, video, writing, archival imagery, and the explorations of foodways. Their work traces the legacies of this history across urban landscapes from Qingdao to Berlin, exposing  the forgotten past and its underlying violence. Intertwining personal and historical narratives, they challenge the colonial gaze and reframe it to re-center reflect contemporary migration experiences.