Black ‘Human Zoo’ Fury Greets Berlin Art Show

A performance-art show with half- naked black people thats touring Europe has drawn protests during its visit to Berlin. Activists have termed it a human zoo.

White stage director Brett Baileys Exhibit B features museum-style installations of living models in static poses designed to highlight the troubled history of European colonialism in Africa.

Black activists demonstrated at the Kleiner Wasserspeicher, which is showing the work as part of the Foreign Affairs Festival, after acclaimed stagings in Brussels and Grahamstown, South Africa.

This is the wrong way to discuss a violent colonial history, said Sandrine Micosse-Aikins, a member of Buehnenwatch, the organization which instigated the protest.

In one piece, a black woman sits above a cooking pot, holding a skull and a shard of glass. A plaque describes how Namibian women in concentration camps had to boil and scrape clean the skulls of their menfolk so that they could be sent to Germany for scientific examination in the early 20th century.

In another display, photographs of severed black heads stuffed and skewered on metal prongs recall the work of Eugen Fischer (1874-1967), the German professor of anthropology and eugenics whose theories of racial hygiene guided the Nazis.

Below them, the heads of four living Namibian singers seem to float above plinths. They sing beautiful Herero songs about genocide, in counterpoint to the grisly displays.

Contemporary asylum seekers are on show alongside a supine representation of Angelo Soliman, an 18th-century Nigerian philosopher and confidant of Maria Theresa and Emperor Joseph I. Upon his death in 1796, Solimans body was stuffed and displayed in a glass case alongside wild animals.

An earlier version of the show, Exhibit A, opened at Viennas Festwochen in 2010 and went on to Braunschweig, Germany, and Helsinki.

On Oct. 2, a post-performance public debate took place in Berlin below the photographs of Fischers severed heads.

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Black ‘Human Zoo’ Fury Greets Berlin Art Show