Theresa Weber: Entangled Histories of the Blue

In the course of the Dekoloniale Artist Residency 2024 “Colonial Ghosts – Resistant Spirits: Church, Colonialism and beyond” at the exhibition Dekoloniale – what remains?!, five selected guest artists present their works at the Museum Nikolakirche and also work with and in the public space of Berlin.

In her multimedia installations, sculptures, paintings and collaborative performances Theresa Weber seeks to challenge existing power hierarchies and fixed categorizations. Her collages are based on site-specific historical research and ancient mythologies and contain culturally charged materials. Her artistic practice is influenced by her perspective as a German born artist with Jamaican, German, and Greek background. She exemplifies the constant transformation within diasporic traditions with a strong reference to Caribbean discourses.

Blue textile structures represent the dynamic root networks that symbolically connect diasporic lives. According to the Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant, the rhizome opposes the one singular root that symbolized and enabled blood and territory throughout Western colonial expansion.

The dynamic soft sculpture opposes the solidity of imperial statues and becomes a memorial, as well as a reclamation, that seeks to confront the role of religion and the church in colonialism.

These performances include a site-specific sound piece by sound artist Nathanael Amadou Kliebhan, who uses historical and site-specific sound recordings alongside abstract, electronically influenced sounds, all woven together into a layered composition. Dancers Maia Joseph and Tiffani Achilleas wear costumes that symbolically represent the body as an ever-transforming, rhizomatic network. Through improvisation, they interact with the soundscape in real time. The exhibition features these collaborative performances at the Nikolaikirche, both at the opening and during its ongoing run.