Exhibition “Mangrove”
Our former fellow Lizza May David presents the exhibition “Mangrove” at the Galerie Michael Janssen in Berlin.
Mangroves grow in the salty or brackish water of tropical coasts. As the tide falls and rises, their roots surface from the swamps and disappear again. Roots and identity, knowledge and its loss, are recurring themes in Lizza May David’s painting, photography, and film.
Her photo series The Mangrove Selection is based on pictures taken by her stepfather, a photographer from a small German town, when he travelled Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines in the 1970s. Before showing them in a small exhibition, he presented his pictures in the family’s photo shop and asked customers and friends to mark their favorites with colored paper dots. In David’s reworking, the album pages and paper dots hold the memory of how the photographer and his audience viewed and framed the unknown Filipinos. This not only reflects on how the perceptions of self and others interact in forming identity. It also raises the question of who, in fact, has the power to decide what is to be seen and what remains untold, and how regimes of knowledge production correlate with economic power relations in a globalized world. (text: Oona Lochner, translation: Lena Fließbach)
Wann?
26 November 2016 to 13 January 2017
Where?
Galerie Michael Janssen
Potsdamer Str. 63
10785 Berlin