Albertinum: Sequence 1. Till the Sun Rises

Sequences: Entangled Internationalisms

“Sequences: Entangled Internationalisms” is a series of three exhibitions by the Research Department of Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD) at Albertinum from February until December 2024. Each sequence is based on a specific historical case study that explores how notions of internationalism with India, Namibia, or Ghana are interwoven with those that emanted from, traversed, or manifested themselves in the German Democratic Republic. The curators of the “sequences” are researchers and academics working in Asia or the African continent. On one hand, the exhibition presents the traces of exchanges with the GDR in these different locations. On the other hand, the curatorial research also includes objects from the art collections in Dresden in dialogue with SKD researchers. “Sequences” adopts a transhistorical method: the presentation of historical objects and works reconstruct their historical contexts, which are scarcely present in current collective memory—here or elsewhere. At the same time, these objects are also material sources of knowledge that span generations and help to develop contemporary forms for historical narratives in the present. In collaboration with Spector Books, each “sequence” will publish a printed and digital research edition.

Till the Sun Rises. Sequence 1

The exhibition “Till the Sun Rises” is the first of the three “Sequences: Entangled Internationalisms.” The project was curated by vinit agarwal, founder of the Oralities Research Lab in Jaipur, India, in dialogue with the artists Chetna Vora, Moses März and Aarti Sunder.

Exhibition Site Albertinum

DATES 02/02/2024—26/05/2024

The sequence mobilizes the film “Oyoyo” (1980) by the Indian filmmaker Chetna Vora (1958–1987), who studied at the Academy of Film and Television of the GDR, as a point of departure. Vora's film is both, a work of art and an archive of internationalism, tracing the trajectories of students from Ethiopia, Chile, Guinea-Bissau and Mongolia, among others, living in a student housing in Berlin-Karlshorst. How can a film activate an understanding of an internationalism today that narrates a polyphony of GDR's entanglement with the world?

What words, sounds, and images emerged from it? The exhibition invokes correspondances with the collections of SKD by presenting objects and documents from the Kupferstich-Kabinett, the Puppet Theater Collection and the museum's archive of SKD. Equally important, “Till the Sun Rises” presents an artistic diagram and a spatial drawing created for the exhibition to chart “Oyoyo” as an archive of sounds, of the feeling of being between home and here, of struggles and love. Both the artistic works as well as the curatorial-spatial concept thus unfold a research process that results from the exchange with historical materials in real time today.

"Sequences" is the curatorial and artistic research part that concludes the international project "Decolonizing Socialism. Entangled Internationalism" (2019-2023) at HEAD Genève of the HES-SO, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, in partnership with the research department of the SKD.

With the kind support of the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF.

The production and the accompanying program were funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of the project "Museums as active places of democracy" (MODemo).