“A tangled, murky zone where fantasy and images, desire and loss, and wit and guilt reside” is how the American conceptual artist Robert Morris once described memory. This heady mix is what you can expect to find in the upcoming exhibition predominantly drawn from the Deutsche Bank Collection. Curated by Kerryn Greenberg, this exhibition will be on view in two successive parts, the first opening in Spring 2023 and the second in Autumn 2023.

This exhibition responds to the acquisitions DeutscheBank has made over the past decade, many of which are by artists from Africa and/or are of African descent. This is one of the legacies of the Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, director of the groundbreaking documenta 11 and long-standing member of Deutsche Bank’s Global Art Advisory Council, who passed away in 2019.

By focusing on personal narratives, alternative perspectives and lesser-known stories, this exhibition seeks to identify the unstable, exploit the slippages, and make clear that the struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

The artists include Sammy Baloji, Yto Barrada, Mohamed Camara, Samuel Fosso, Anawana Haloba, Lubaina Himid, Lebohang Kganye, Wangechi Mutu, Paulo Nazareth, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Zhora Opoku, Jo Ractliffe, Berni Searle, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Mikhael Subotzky, Kara Walker, Alberta Whittle, and Hoy Cheong Wong. 

Greenberg is the Associate Curator for the upcoming 14th Gwangju Biennale and co-Director of New Curators, a paid one-year curatorial training programme in London for individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Previously she was Head of International Collection Exhibitions at Tate where, amongst other things, she was responsible for founding Tate’s Africa Acquisitions Committee in 2011.