Dekoloniale Ausstellung & Talk: TCHILOLI DEMASKED

Decolonial photo exhibition & talk as part of the Group Exhibition "Under The Rug"

TCHILOLI DEMASKED (Instagram: @tchiloli_demasked)

How do we understand stories told under a mask?

🇸🇹 During the 500 years of Portuguese colonial rule on the West African island of São Tomé, a performance was created that is still alive today, in which figures from the European Middle Ages fight for justice with sunglasses-wearing lawyers: the tchiloli.

What may seem like a faithful staging of Charlemagne's legends is in fact a stage for counter histories: stories of resistance, spirituality and the identity of a nation that had to re-form itself from the descendants of enslaved people.

Black Skin, White Masks, the key colonial-critical work by Frantz Fanon (1952), is an apt analogy to Tchiloli. As in all post-colonial societies, phenomena such as double consciousness, which W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about as early as 1903, are also evident on São Tomé: the torn nature of the black experience between one's own self-perception and the discriminatory attributions of the white "dominant culture".

Between adaptation and rebellion, between the Middle Ages and modernity: many supposed contradictions are also evident in Tchiloli - like white masks on black faces.

Friday, May 23, 2025, 7-10 pm:

Opening at Fotogalerie Friedrichshain, with Felix Vollmann (photographer) and Jacqueline Gomes (research).

Saturday, May 25, 2025, 6-10 p.m.

Meet the Artists - Talk about the exhibition (online - link follows)

All are welcome - the exhibition runs until the end of June.

Instagram: @tchiloli_demasked

TCHILOLI DEMASKED is a photo exhibition as part of the analogueNOW 2025 group exhibition "Under the Rug.": Stories that have been hidden, overlooked or deliberately swept under the rug are brought to life photographically here.

These artists are exhibiting:

ANTONINA SAVYTSKA
DIANE MEYER
FELIX VOLLMANN & JACQUELINE GOMES
ILJA NIEDERKIRCHNER
JOSEFINE RAUCH
JOSHUA COCKROFT
MATEVZ CEBASEK
MONICA MUNOZ
PETER PFLÜGLER
RAMONA ZORDINI
SAORI KANEKO & RICHARD WELZ