WE ARE WHAT WE ARE NOT

In the organizer's words:

What is missing tells its own story.

When objects disappear from a museum collection, traces are left behind: catalog entries, inventory numbers, classification systems. They mark what is gone - but do not replace it. What is missing remains as a ghost in the archive.

WE ARE WHAT WE ARE NOT does not show any objects from the RJM's holdings. The exhibition by curator and artist Yohannes Mulat Mekonnen focuses on what is no longer there - and asks what these absences tell us about the museum, its history and its power structures.

His approach is at once analytical and poetic, theoretical and sensual, serious and humorous. In response to a missing African headrest, Mekonnen has collected dreams - none of which are part of the collection - and made them audible in an immersive installation in which visitors are invited to sleep into these dreams.

He has searched the archive for edible objects and developed a dinner performance from them. In his mixed-media installations, films and photographs, theoretical investigation becomes sensual experience - and the most rigorous response to loss can also be the most unexpected, the most tender and sometimes the most cheerful. Visitors are invited to read absence not as a lack - but as a beginning.

Link to the exhibition: Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum Cologne | WE ARE WHAT WE ARE NOT