It’s a
winter Sunday. It’s cold. With my husband and our two children, we want to
relax somewhere nice. We settle for a visit to the museum. The Schirn
Kunsthalle in Frankfurt is offering an exhibition on dioramas. It’s supposed to
be great for kids.
In the hall, on the ticket counter, a notice warns
visitors that the exhibit contains an explicit representation of a human body.
Fair enough. When you take young children to see modern art, it’s good to know
roughly what to expect. In fact, we are fine with the body. It’s a bad piece of
art, rather sexist, but quite harmless. What we are not fine with is what we
see afterwards. We are in a big hall which only features dioramas and pictures
of animals of all sorts. All animals, except that…
A screen shows an old documentary video taken (most
certainly by a white person) somewhere on the African continent. This does not
depict animals. Here are people. Black bodies. Bodies with no voice. Bodies
exposed to the white gaze. Like animals.
I hastily pull away my children. We’re not going to
look at this. They are used to it. Used to me dragging them away from
something. They already know. No, we’re not looking at this, mum, it’s racist.
That’s what racism is. It comes unexpected. It feels
like a punch in the stomach. You want to run away, and you do, but it stays
with you. I wish we had been warned.
