Covering a wide range of topics, C/O Berlin is known as one of the German capital’s most prolific spaces for photography. From February to early May 2025, it presented A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography. Curated by Osei Bonsu from the Tate Modern and C/O Berlin’s guest curator Cale Garrido, the exhibition had first been on display at Bonsu’s home institution in London more than a year earlier. Already in 2015 C/O Berlin had focused on African photography when it hosted the Walther Collection’s show Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive curated by Tamar Garb.1 While Garb drew the line between the pasts of the archive and the present—contextualizing yet still including colonial representations of Africans—Bonsu and Garrido concentrated primarily on works dating to the twenty-first century. Their selected list of twenty-three artists from across the continent and the diaspora read like a who’s who of contemporary African photography: Edson Chagas, Kudzanai Chiurai, Lebohang Kganye, Aïda Muluneh, and Zina Sarow-Wiwa, to mention only a few, belong to the well-known players of the global art market who had been previously represented at major biennials and exhibitions worldwide.Comprising documentary and conceptual photography, fine art photography and photography as an expanded form of media, the exhibition not only unfolded the medium’s variety but as became clear from the introductory wall text, it also aimed high in its conceptual outline. Referring to philosopher Achille Mbembe—yet another prominent voice from the African continent—the curators sought to “consider a future of shared possibilities, one that acknowledges what we have in common” (Bonsu and Garrido 2025b). Bonsu and Garrido intended no less than to “reimagine Africa’s place in the world” and to challenge “colonial representations of African peoples and cultures” (Bonsu and Garrido 2025b). To do so they organized the exhibition, which took up C/O Berlin’s entire ground floor, into three chapters titled “Identity and Tradition,” “Counter Histories,” and “Imagined Futures.” Thus, the curator team ambitiously set out to look simultaneously into the past, present and future and to cover the main tropes that institutional exhibitions on African art are prone to call for: tradition, religion, colonialism, the archive, climate emergency, and migration.In this vein, A World in Common started off with Kudzanai Chiurai’s We Live in Silence (2017) and George Osodi’s Nigerian Monarchs (2012) (Fig. 1). The curators envisaged the two large-format color series laden with iconography not only to opposed ethnographic ways of representation but also to look into how traditions resonate in today’s world. Similarly, the two following sections sought to point out how colonialism had influenced the realm of spirituality and how contemporary artists currently negotiate this heritage. With its strong focus on masks, comprising among others Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s well-known series Bodies of Experience (1989) (Fig. 2) and more recent video works by Zina Saro-Wiwa and Wura-Natasha Ogunji, this last section drew attention to a theme that is at high risk to reiterate stereotypes.In a somewhat contorted exhibition architecture, the show continued with the second chapter that reflected the tendency in contemporary art to debate colonial pasts by working on and countering the archive. While Santu Mofokeng’s now-iconic The Black Photo Album/Look at Me (1997) was an earlier example of such artistic practices, which at the time indeed opened new perspectives on the photographic representation of Blacks during colonialism, the curators reached out to also include positions like Malala Andrialavidrazana’s collages that amalgamate historic maps with photographs and images from the broader visual culture.The “Counter Histories” chapter extended into the last, large gallery space, which it shared—separated by a diagonal wall—with the show’s final and smallest part, “Imagined Futures.” The five artistic positions displayed here were concerned with nothing less than the climate emergency, globalization, and migration. Encompassing, for instance, Mário Macilau’s The Profit Corner (2015), reminiscent of Pieter Hugo’s series Permanent Error (2010) from Ghana, and Aïda Muluneh’s Water Life (2018), the selection of works varied stylistically between black-and-white documentary and highly staged photography in plane colors. The photograph by Dawit L. Petros that had advertised A World in Common across Berlin could be understood as the exhibition’s endpoint (Fig. 3): From the series The Stranger’s Notebook (2016), the image of a person holding up a rectangular mirror was meant to reflect the photographer’s position as “stranger” and to open up new perspectives on the landscape marked by colonial borders.Yet, while A World in Common undoubtedly presented a broad spectrum of contemporary photography, it remains to question to what extent the show opened up new perspectives on the African continent and highlighted new photographic practices. Indeed, the exhibition’s main asset of bringing together twenty-three renowned artists and approaching the fundamental tropes of our time also seemed to be its weakest point.Especially to viewers unfamiliar with Achille Mbembe’s writings, the philosopher’s reasoning and how the single works related to it remained rather vague throughout the show. One would have wished for a more thorough explanation of how Mbembe’s thinking about Africa’s role in the world is aimed to counter the series of imaginations that often gets set in motion nearly automatically at the catchword “Africa” and how he argues for understanding the continent not as a world apart from the rest, resolving divisions and moving towards conviviality instead. Certainly, this should not question the quality of single works on display and how they possibly opposed stereotypical colonial representations.Yet, this has already been the narrative of ground-breaking exhibitions twenty years and more ago. Okwui Enwezor’s In/Sight: African Photographers 1940 to Present (1996), The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994 (2001/2) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006) or Simon Njami’s Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (2004) presented Africa’s modernity to the world by means of photography.Different to Tamar Garb for the Distance and Desire exhibition, Bonsu and Garrido refrained completely from showing historical photography. Thus, they remained true to their aim to refute colonial visions of Africa through contemporary negotiations of the past.2 Yet, in so doing they also omitted those historical examples that would have offered viewers a glimpse into confident photographic practices apart from the colonial gaze. Works by James Barnor and Lazhar Mansouri from the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, had still been part of the exhibition’s London edition. By excluding them in Berlin, the curators removed the historical contextualisation the show once had at least with regard to portrait studio photography, presenting Africa’s modernity at the middle of the twentieth century.As a result of touching only superficially on the fundamental issues like tradition, religion, and colonialism, the curators got trapped in a representation of Africa that for viewers without a profound knowledge of the specificities of single African cultures and histories hid their particularities in an undifferentiated opacity. The pitfalls of such a survey approach became blatant in the wall texts, when they explained, for instance, “Masks are a significant part of African cultural heritage, playing an important role in ritual and ceremonial performances across many regions” (Bonsu and Garrido 2025a). Here the exhibition failed to break open commonly repeated platitudes. For a little more differentiated historic and theoretical contextualization, viewers had to resort on the catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition’s London edition, including essays by acknowledged scholars such as Sandrine Colard, Jennifer Bajorek, and Nomusa Makhubu (Bonsu 2023).What remains of the exhibition at C/O Berlin is thus the impression that Bonsu and Garrido played the safe card by relying on established photographers. In that sense, A World in Common regrettably did not offer surprising new perspectives to the viewers but—seemingly following and responding to the tides of the art market—it rather contributed to solidifying a canon of contemporary African photography.
KATHARINA JÖRDER (Thu,) studied this question.