Installation by the artist Tina Born in the museum garden
In May 1888, on behalf of the German Emperor Wilhelm II, the colonial official Franz Sonnenschein (1857–1897) signed the official takeover proclamation of the potato-shaped island of Nauru, isolated in the Western Pacific. At that time, 12 Micronesian chiefs and their 12 tribes lived on Nauru.
Image gallery
Tina Born Kommissar Sonnenschein (Der Türöffner) - Entwurfszeichnung für eine Installation
The island, previously known as Pleasant Island or also called "Whalers' Paradise" because of its beautiful islanders and rich stocks of palm liquor, was part of the "protected area" of the German Empire until the outbreak of the First World War.
After the First World War, the country passed alternately to Australia, Great Britain, Japan and New Zealand and was caught between the fronts and under German fire in the Second World War.
»My artistic fields of work are object construction and installation. References to location and spatiality as well as context-related research (historical, political, ethnological) play an important role. My desire is to enable a multi-layered associative structure, a strong visual narrative and to find an artistic form for questions that concern human existence. One of these questions is the consequences and distortions of colonialism, which shape our lives and thinking from the 'Age of Discovery' in the 15th century to the height of colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries to the present day.
As part of artistic research, I traveled to former German colonies (Namibia, 2013, independent state of Samoa, 2015) and dealt with its current continuations, including in the exhibition 'Manga Bell', 2019 at the Kunsthaus Dahlem.«
Tina Born
