Exhibition

Exhibition MAY TOWN IN ZETKIN PARK Traces of an exhibition | digital and real interventions by artists from Chile, Colombia, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Namibia, Panama, Poland, Tanzania, USA Leipzig, Clara Zetkin Park. One day in May 2022: Karl May is really standing before us, or is it virtual? He still loves to tell stories about faraway countries that he has never seen himself. Now he is making up for it and taking us with him into his time machine. A cube at the park entrance is the starting point for the journey through a digital mapping, through the city’s past and the world’s present. Markers on the trees and squares guide our smartphone to digital and analogue art objects, performances and commentaries by twelve artists from all over the world, who deal with Germany’s colonial heritage. They tell us what still concerns us today in real-time encounters – virtual and direct.

The digital-analogue exhibition follows traces from 120 years ago, when the park was laid out for the STIGA, the “Saxon-Thuringian Industrial and Commercial Exhibition”. Progress was celebrated with a gigantic industrial palace, exhibitions and all kinds of entertainment venues. And the superiority of one’s own culture, which was believed to be real. In the “East African Village”, “cast” people from Africa showed their supposed lives and, as involuntary actors, conveyed an exotic image of archaic foreignness and backwardness.

The park is now once again becoming a stage, a display for positions and world views and for postcolonial perspectives on history and the present. Between May and July, we are inviting the audience to explorations with digital formats and real interventions on site. The cube at the park entrance near the roundabout/Anton-Bruckner-Allee is our starting point for this. A production by Schaubühne Lindenfels as part of the theme year 2022 “Leipzig – City for Education” and part of the cultural project “125 Years of STIGA”. 21 May to 31 July | Clara Zetkin Park Participating artists: Soheil Boroumand, Alberto Bustamante, Johannes Gabriel, Eucaris Guillen, Meigl Hoffmann, Angela Kobelt, Kay Liemann, Salvo Lombardo, Juliana Márquez Villacís, Kenji Paisley-Hortensia, Cristina Rizzo, Lisa Schiller-Witzmann, Pedro Sepúlveda Cruz Coke, Bastian Sistig, Thadeusz Szabo, Isabel Tuemuna Katjavivi