After the relentless guilt trip of the Berlin Biennale 12th, you’d be forgiven for not rushing to see another exhibition focusing on societal repair. But whereas the BB12 was a dense, oddly detached exhibition, YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal is more contemplative and engaging.
Grace Ndiritu blows up photos of white museum workers posing alongside objects (skulls) from colonial contexts.
These often long-standing research projects blend creativity with the most urgent questions of our day: the necessity for responsibility and kinship in the face of rising political and environmental instability. Brook Andrew gives a devastating examination of the legacy of white supremacy with a glass vitrine full of disturbing ethnographic exhibits.
In the newly commissioned tapestries ‘Repair’ (1915) and ‘Restitution’ (1973), Grace Ndiritu blows up photos of white museum workers posing alongside objects (skulls) from colonial contexts. But the show is above all about healing, and the mustachioed faces have been digitally altered to open up to a wider discourse on exhibition making.
Near the end, an installation by Anne Duk Hee Jordan brings connective catharsis, as a booming underworld envelops everyone laying inside it. Tremendous thought has gone into this piercing show; a fitting way to end the stewardship of the museum’s outgoing director, Stephanie Rosenthal.
- Through Jan 15 2023 Gropius Bau, Kreuzberg
