immersion

visual art

Immersion is a site specific intervention by David Weber-Krebs, made of a mural, a sound installation and an assemblage of artefacts selected from the collection of Weltkulturen Museum – Museum of World Cultures in Frankfurt am Main

Immersion has been realized in 2013-14 for Foreign Exchange, an exhibition on the relationship between anthropology and trade, at the Weltkulturen Museum.

Foreign exchange is an account of certain disturbing ways of visualising human beings in the name of science; of the transformation of the human body into that of an object; of the fascination with the Other; of the passion for collecting; of the mission to preserve remote cultures for all eternity; of the need to find systems for that task. And it’s an account of the role that is ultimately always played by money and trade.

The museum collection of more than 1000 artefacts coming from 36 different countries have been combined with artistic research produced in the Weltkulturen Labor by: Peggy Buth (DE), Minerva Cuevas (MX), Luke Willis Thompson (NZ) and David Weber-Krebs (BE), as well as new texts by writers in residence Gabriel Gbadamosi (GB), David Lau (US), and Tom McCarthy (GB). Additional artworks by Marie Angeletti (FR), Lothar Baumgarten (DE), Benedikte Bjerre (DK), Rut Blees Luxemburg (DE), Clegg & Guttmann (US), Rotimi Fani-Kayode (NG), Armin Linke (IT), Otobong Nkanga (NG), Pushpamala N (IN) and Olivier Richon (CH).

Foreign exchange has been curated by Dr. Clémentine Deliss and Dr. Yvette Mutumba.

concept
david weber-krebs
assistance
marie urban
    'Foreign Exchange' exhibition poster
    Immersion (detail)

Diving into the Ocean of a Collection is the interview of Beatrice Barrois with David Weber-Krebs, realized in June 2016.

Beatrice Barrois:
David, in 2012 you were invited by the Weltkulturen
Museum in Frankfurt for a residency, to create, based on the collection, a new work for the exhibition “FOREIGN EXCHANGE (or the stories you wouldn’t tell a stranger)“, which took place from January 16, 2014 until January 4, 2015. For some time now there has been a trend to invite artists to contribute within the discourse about the future of ethnological museums…

    Nahaufnahmen, Frankfurter Rundschau, 15 january 2014
    installation text at weltkulturen museum

An interview of Clémentine Deliss with David Weber-Krebs, realized on the occasion of the exhibition Foreign Exchange.

CD:
I think anyone can go through a research process without knowing exactly what the final result will be, just feeling their way and moving closer or listening, then gradually forming an idea of something. That must happen in a similar way for researchers on their travels and for someone who comes here to our museum.
Before you came, what were your ideas about research in a museum of world cultures?

DWK:
I don’t know what ideas I had, but I didn’t imagine that the objects would play the leading role. I began my work with a certain notion or ambition of immersion: that as a viewer, you enter a museum and thus other worlds that are more about cartographies, histories and ethnographies than about material objects…

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weltkulturen museum, frankfurt/main

visual art

weltkulturen museum, frankfurt/main

lecture
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