When All Else fails, Try Love

WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS, TRY LOVE

Künstlerhaus Bethanien

30.09. — 23.10.2022

The exhibition “When All Else Fails, Try Love“ is a result of Rafiki’s residency in Berlin that she spent sitting with Germany’s colonial history and its aftermath. Working with the notion of „looted history“, she turns to the problem of stolen cultural elements and the colonial entanglements of art history.

Continuing her work on connected global histories and intergenerational forms of remembrance and healing, she also turns to the presence of human remains in German museum collections, hospital archives and universities, which stem from the colonial practice of collecting human bodies under the auspices of research. Here, Rafiki traces how dehumanizing logics continue to operate in cultural institutions today when the bones of ancestors become labeled as „artifacts“ or „property“.

Experiencing institutional practices of this kind as a sensation of being relegated to the „living dead“, Rafiki responds by embalming herself. How does a Black body exist when it is conditioned to act from a position of “other”? In her site-specific installation, spanning photographic, video and sculptural work, we witness the artist’s enactment of mummification as a first step to resurrection. Refusing the role of Black bodies to become the designated agents of change vis-à-vis „looted histories“, Rafiki hands the responsibility for restitution back to the institutions in question.

– excerpt from text by Noemi Y. Molitor