




Dierk Schmidt. The Division of the Earth - Tableaux on the Legal Synopses of the Berlin Africa Conference
At the Berlin Africa Conference held in 1884/85, the European powers and the United States gathered to prepare the division of an entire continent in the form of a legal act already termed “international” at the time. Based on two picture series by artist Dierk Schmidt exhibited at Salzburger Kunstverein and documenta 12 in Kassel, this book documents a project underpinned by long-term research, and therefore cannot leave it at a documentary “visualisation.” With a clear sense of urgency, Schmidt raises the question how one can respond to the brutality with which colonial border-drawing was imposed upon then-existing societies. Is there a “pictorial language” able to convey a juridical abstraction of this sort as the historical by-product of Europe’s political and aesthetic modernity?
Edited by Lotte Arndt, Clemens Krümmel, Dierk Schmidt, Hemma Schmutz, Diethelm Stoller and Ulf Wuggenig.
Publisher: Buchhandlung Walther König.
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