visible through display windows, on the occasion of Düsseldorf Photo+
BauSchau Düsseldorf, Brehmstraße 41
Appointments via email
Artist Talk with Matthias Gründig (Folkwang Universität der Künste) on our YouTube channel:
“Juli 2020 // Künstlergespräch / Rebecca Racine Ramershoven: Me & Mr. Jones”
Since the exhibition in March on the occasion of Photo+ had to be interrupted due to known reasons, it can now continue.
„Me & Mr. Jones“ is a personal and artistic examination of identity, origin and affiliation. It offers a political reflection on the complex changes of Black German identity over the last 70 years, and it is a negotiation of Rebecca Racine Ramershoven’s lived experience as a black woman in Germany.
Documenting her first visit to her African American family in Philadelphia in 2017 and juxtaposing these photos with private footage and objects from her German family archive, she follows two autobiographical lines. The first line goes back to her African American grandfather, who was based as a soldier in Germany after WWII, and his complex relationship to his black German daughter – her mother. The second line leads to her white German grandfather and his son – her father.
Examining these contradictory family histories, Ramershoven reveals the complexities which determine black German subject positions. Through aesthetic and thematic motifs, such as color and style, as well as recorded conversations, she establishes implicit and explicit connections between both autobiographical lines. As a consequence, viewers get a deeper understanding of the complexities of black German subjectivity and the need for a public political discussion about blackness, whiteness, and Germanness.
