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The Museum Campus in Neu-Ulm will be closed in August.

Please note that the museum campus in Neu-Ulm will be closed in August. We will re-open on Thursday, September 1, between 2 – 5 pm, and look forward to welcoming visitors to see the retrospective exhibition Samuel Fosso: The Man with a Thousand Faces – on view until November 20, 2022.

During our closure, we encourage you to visit our major traveling exhibition Shifting Dialogues: Photography from The Walther Collection at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, K21 in Düsseldorf, Germany, on view until September 25, 2022. With more than 500 artworks from Africa, its diaspora and Europe, the exhibition traces the development of photography as a history of transnational parallels and contradictions: from early ethnographic imagery made during the colonial era, self-determined studio photography and politics of self-fashioning from the 1940s onwards to present-day visual activism by a constituency of contemporary artists. To read more about the exhibition, click here.

Listen to Artur Walther speak about the exhibition in this short video interview — recalling his first exposure to photography from Africa nearly 25 years ago, and reflecting on his friendship with the late curator Okwui Enwezor; and Susanne Gaensheimer, director of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (K20 & K21), reflecting on The Walther Collection as one of the most significant collections focused on African and Asian photography worldwide, while also discussing the Kunstsammlung’s own mission to expand and diversify their holdings through new perspectives in order to generate a more polyphonic dialogue.

For more videos with collaborators, curators and artists of Shifting Dialogues: Photography from The Walther Collection, please follow us on Instagram or Facebook.

Have a safe and enjoyable summer.

We look forward to welcoming you again soon.

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Autoportrait is the first comprehensive survey of self-portraits by Samuel Fosso, one of the most significant African photographic artists working today. Since the mid-1970s, Fosso has focused on self-portraiture and performance, envisioning variations of identity in the postcolonial era, reflecting themes in global visual culture, and covering the range of expressive applications of the photographic medium.

Edited by Okwui Enwezor.

SIXSIXSIX is dedicated to an extraordinary series of 666 large-scale Polaroids by Samuel Fosso. Made in his Paris studio between October and November 2015, these portraits further emphasize the particular themes of performance and identity construction epitomized in Fosso’s earlier self-portraits. The impressive size and volume of this book, featuring an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, courses a new trajectory in Fosso’s work: an encounter with the camera that is unmediated, repetitive, unabridged, and effected over space and time.

Jo Ractliffe, Photographs: 1980s to now is the first book to present a comprehensive selection of the work of South African photographer Jo Ractliffe. Looking back over the past 35 years, it brings together images from major photo-essays, as well as early works that have not been seen before. Described by Okwui Enwezor as “one of the most accomplished and under-rated photographers of her generation,” Ractliffe started working in the early 1980s, and her photographs continue to reflect her preoccupation with the South African landscape and the ways in which it figures in the country’s imaginary—particularly the violent legacies of apartheid. In 2007 she extended her interests to the war in Angola and published three photobooks on the aftermath of that conflict and its manifestations in the South African landscape: Terreno Ocupado (2008), As Terras do Fim do Mundo (2010) and The Borderlands (2015).