Les gens ne disent presque rien @ KUNSTHALLE GIESSEN: Roméo Mivekannin

In his paintings and installations, the French-Beninese artist Roméo Mivekannin combines European pictorial traditions with questions of (Black) identity, memory, and colonial violence. With humour and critical distance, he inserts himself into the canonical works of art history, thereby exposing this history’s omissions and blind spots.

For his first institutional solo exhibition in Germany at the KUNSTHALLE GIESSEN, Mivekannin is developing an installation inspired by Adolf Hitler’s never-realized “Fuhrermuseum” in Linz. Within a walk-in cage structure modelled after the monumental building, he presents portraits of artists active during the Nazi era – ranging from victims such as Elfriede Lohse-Wachtler to sup- porters like Leni Riefenstahl – revealing the entanglements between art, fascism, and colonialism, to which the exhibition’s title (Eng. “Barely a word was spoken”) also alludes. The exhibition thus questions the role of institutions as spaces for historical reflection and examines how art and artists are instrumentalized under political conditions.

At the same time, Mivekannin’s works serve as vessels of a ritual healing process: as a descendant of Béhanzin, the last king of Dahomey, he reconnects with his spiritual heritage. His canvases, often made from used bedsheets, are – following Vodun practices – immersed in elixirs before painting in order to cleanse them of negative energies. His ceramic works, which contain ceremonial substances, likewise refer to this origin, intertwining the spiritual and the political.