Curvature of Events. Baroque. Romanticism. Video

Many contemporary art exhibitions in African countries are developed by German or European curators from an ethnographic perspective. The project “Curvature of Events. Baroque. Romanticism. Video” reverses this perspective. In cooperation with the Goethe-Institut South Africa, the Dresden State Art Collections invited the Ethiopian curator Meskerem Assegued to become acquainted with the holdings in Dresden and develop an exhibition concept for the New Masters Gallery in the Albertinum. Meskerem Assegued created a video exhibition which focuses on how the artists of the Renaissance, the Baroque and Romanticism periods perceived their social circumstances and how contemporary artists interpret these depictions today. For the exhibition, Assegued asked three artists from Italy, Ethiopia and Germany to examine selected artworks from the collections and use the medium of film to offer a contemporary response to art from earlier periods.
Meskerem Assegued looks back at more than 20 years of experience as a curator. In the past sixteen years, she has curated exhibitions in Europe, Africa and North America.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a cultural programme of round tables, discussions and a workshop. A corresponding catalogue will document the exhibition.

A project by the State Art Collections Dresden in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut in Johannesburg.

Artistic project director: Hartwig Fischer
Curator of the exhibition “Curvature of Events”: Meskerem Assegued (ET)
Video artists: Gunter Deller, Barbara Lubich, Abel Tilahun