The Brooklyn Rail

Beninese artist Georges Adéagbo’s new installation at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, “L’œuvre d’art d’Aby Warburg et les œuvres d’art des artistes”… ! [“Aby Warburg’s work of art and the artists’ work of art”…!] (2024) presents a wildly kaleidoscopic vision of the search for understanding—of history, culture, and self. Inspired by maverick German art historian Aby Warburg’s investigations of how tragedies and triumphs resonate in art and popular culture from antiquity to the modern era, it considers a multitude of complex, still-unfolding stories. To examine Hamburg’s role in the slave trade and colonialism, the Kunsthalle’s evolution, and the artist’s own life, it deploys a dizzying multitude of materials, including books and newspaper clippings, clothing, mannequins, album covers, paintings, wooden masks and sculptures, and dozens of the artist’s own poetic handwritten notes. Pinned to the gallery walls in snaking arrangements and laid out on the floor in symbolic displays, Adéagbo’s arrangements represent an ambitious attempt at a totalizing vision of life in the information age. Like all of his works, which are based on the fast-moving, metonymic logic of association, the installation swirls beyond complete comprehension. Existing in a unique creative space somewhere between Mark Lombardi’s forensic diagrams of realpolitik’s brutalities, Hans-Peter Feldmann’s playful investigations of photography and emotion, and Gerhard Richter’s self-archiving memory-bank atlas, Adéagbo’s immersive environments describe tantalizing intersections between subjective and objective realities. Born in Cotonou in 1942, Adéagbo works in that city and in Hamburg. He has exhibited his work around the world, including in major surveys such as the Venice and Sao Paolo Biennales, documenta, and Okwui Enwezor’s The Short Century (2001). He also has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (2000), the Israel Museum (2016) and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (2023). In this conversation he is joined by his producer and interpreter, German curator Stephan Köhler.

Toby Kamps (Rail): Could you please describe your new work at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, “Aby Warburg's work of art and the artists’ work of art”…!? It’s an installation composed of 192 different objects arranged on the gallery walls and floor. These are things you’ve collected in Cotonou and Hamburg, where you maintain studios, along with paintings and wooden sculptures and masks that you’ve had made by artists in Benin.

Georges Adéagbo: It’s interesting to see people’s destinies. Only God knows how he created the world, and it’s fascinating to trace the stories. I ponder aloud about the life of Aby Warburg, who was born here in Hamburg to the famous Warburg banking family. As eldest son, he was destined to be the main heir of the whole company, but he said, “I’m more interested in art and art history.” “I will give my little brother the position of oldest son if he promises that the family will buy me all the books I want until I die.” That’s the key story that got me so excited about Aby Warburg. This is someone who could have inherited a major international banking business and decided to renounce it and go study art history in Florence. That’s the beginning. It shows that he had, at a young age, a sense of what he wanted to do in his life.

Rail: You have had a long-standing interest in Aby Warburg and his unique interdisciplinary approach to art history and cultural studies. He is famous for his search for the Pathosformel, or “pathos formula,” a universal expression of strong emotions in antiquity and all subsequent world cultures. In fact, you had an exhibition at Hamburg’s Warburg-Haus, an interdisciplinary forum for art history and cultural studies in 2019. In many ways your work resembles Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. This work, which he left unfinished at his death in 1929, consists of arrangements of images that trace the afterlife of antiquity, especially images of tragedy and transcendence, through time and across different cultures. In it, he placed images from art history but also from contemporary advertisements on panels in associative groups. Clearly, there are many parallels between his vision—of the migration of forms, symbols, and myths through cultures and time—and your installations, which also arrange images and objects in loose grouping to spark new connections. Could you talk about this kinship?

Adéagbo: It comes back to need and relation. When someone asks me to work on a project, I will try to get to know the person or their situation or their institution to find out who they are and what they need. If someone needs some shoes, you shouldn’t offer them trousers. I mean, you just have to communicate and find out what the person needs.

Stephan Köhler: Why do you call him “the artist Aby Warburg”?

Adéagbo: Everybody wants to be an artist today, but is everybody able or meant to be one? For me, as I often write in my installations and on my paintings, art is a way to tell things to your fellow human beings without creating antagonisms and without becoming enemies. Art is a soft way to talk about very difficult issues. And also about the freedom to organize freely your research tools and insights. That’s why the way that Warburg organized his library resembles how I store what I collect, not following any archival norms. Aby Warburg did not put all Italian art together or all the Nordic art together. He did not use the categories that librarians used to classify art. He would mix things in a way where he saw similarities. It’s like when artists work in the Warburg library for example. They should not ever change the position of books in their neighborhoods of other books. There are certain neighborhoods that don’t make sense to librarians and their categories, but that make sense to Warburg’s understanding of similarities between different cultures. When you research, you start with a problem and a question, and you say, “I have to find a solution to this problem. I need to research all around the subject.” For example, let’s look at my life. It’s destiny and moments and turning points. I lived totally alone for twenty-three years. Then on April 4, 1993, a man called Jean-Michel Rousset stumbled into my quad in Cotonou looking for a totally different artist. It was due to a mistake by his guide that he saw me working in my yard. But what would have happened to me if I hadn’t been discovered?

Rail: Georges, as I look around your Hamburg studio—with its associative arrangements of found books, texts, images, and objects, along with paintings and sculptures that you’ve had made by artists in Benin that run around the room—it’s clear to me that you are a researcher. But you’re studying the reverberations between things rather than their specific histories. You are looking at connections, the way two things from entirely different contexts—such as a page from a German newspaper on the persecution of LGBTQ people in Africa and a British cigar-store figurine in colonial garb—bounce off each other symbolically to point to complex, cross-cultural histories of power and perception. I also think it’s fair to say that you are an impresario. You set things in motion by building on your subjective responses to them. You illuminate not only the lives or auras of images and things, but also the new lives they can have when they become part of a grand chain of adjacencies, as in “Aby Warburg’s work of art.”

Köhler: Looking at the past, but also trying out new combinations, like a laboratory. Or like a film director. I feel like Georges makes movie storyboards. His work traces what people did in the past, but also has a utopian aspect, especially his texts that talk about consequences of actions: if you do this, what will happen, and if you do that instead, what then?

Rail: That’s a great analogy.

Adéagbo: I never wanted to be an artist or be in the art world. It’s a family story, because my family made me come back to Benin, when my father died. It’s my family’s fault that I’m now in the art world because they blocked me from going back to France to finish studying business administration in Rouen. During my internships, I was already offered good jobs and would be retired now with a nice pension payment.

Rail: You have a law degree too, right?

Adéagbo: I have a law degree from the Ivory Coast, and then I went to France to study business administration. Yet back in Benin, no one cared about my education. Family and neighbors said studying in France made me sick. So those people who laughed at me and threw stones and pebbles at me, would they have assumed that I would be a quite well-known artist one day? It is crazy how the world and destinies are created.

Rail: As I understand it, the French curator Jean-Michel Rousset stumbled into your courtyard where you had been collecting and arranging newspaper clippings and found objects, which included African sculptures or recycled containers. In the morning, you would lay them out in the garden, looking at the way they could connect and create narratives. And then in the evening, you would stack them in piles and put them away. How did you develop this daily practice?

Adéagbo: Even though I get out of bed late, I’m already awake at five in the morning and seeing images passing in front of my eyes. For example, I would see images of a snake attacking a frog and I would wonder why the snake—who shares the same earthly zone—would attack the frog. So you see—

Rail: The flow of images.

Adéagbo: Yes, and with those images I see in bed, I start to work when I get up. So the destiny of a human being is in the moment or in the hour. There are moments when doors open. And when that moment is meant to be, you will find access and that things are easy to do. And sometimes we want something badly—to have it or have it happen—and we hit our heads on the wall and say, “When is it happening?” But it’s just not the right moment. Sometimes you just have to wait for the moment, for it to open up, for it to happen.

Rail: But if at five in the morning you’re having a sort of a lucid dream in which you are seeing all these images, how do you get from the dream state to marshaling actual materials?

Adéagbo: I was asked some time to give a workshop for art students on how to choose found objects. I said, “I can’t do that. I cannot teach you how to find these objects or be sensitive to them, and I cannot teach you how to combine them.” Everyone has their own attractions or sensitivities. I cannot tell art students to pick up this or that. You can see a thousand things, but among them there’d be only a few that call out to you. I will not pick up everything that I see on the road. It’s just that there are certain things that kind of raise their hand and say, “Hey, take me. It’s me, today.”

Köhler: You should note that he used the phrase, which is interesting, “les objets m’interpellent,” which means that the objects have a voice and call him.

Adéagbo: So there’s a certain agency to things that call out “Hello, hello, Georges. Take me.” Sometimes I walk by and then ten minutes later the thing says, “No, go back.” So just before I was discovered by Jean-Michele Rousset, a couple of days before, I already had found things on the street like a newspaper article lying on the floor, talking about an artist who transforms drum cans or plastic canisters into masks. He’s quite well known now. His name is Romuald Hazoumè.

Rail: He’s another artist from Benin.

Adéagbo: Yes. So I picked up the article that talked about Romuald sometime in 1993 but I just threw it away and kept going, ignoring it. I felt like I don’t want to take another thing, no. But the article said, “No, come and get me.” So it’s a pull. That night when I went to bed I had the article in my jacket pocket, and I fell asleep. And I dreamed that someone came into my room. That person in my dream came into my room and went to my jacket. There were many pieces of paper and things in my big pockets, but the person picked only that article out. The person said, “Have you looked at it? Have you read it? Get up and read it.” He pointed with his finger to his eyes, then to the article, sign language for “Make sure you read this,” then he left and closed the door. So I went to my jacket, I got this article out and went out to the road to read it under a lamppost, because I had no electricity. It said he was a student at a high school, and his parents didn’t have enough money to pay for his schooling.

Rail: This is Romuald Hazoumè?

Adéagbo: Yes. There was an article about him in the magazine. He started to collect plastic canisters from garbage piles and to transform them into masks. Now he’s known all over the world. My elder brother worked in a gasoline station, and I wondered if I could transform some of his gasoline canisters into a mask. Also, in Benin people make offerings on the roadside for family members or to ask for something. When the offering is over, I would take that home and use it in one of my installations. If Romuald Hazoumè has become famous for transforming these daily things, I thought that maybe one day I will become known for what I was doing: picking up things in the streets and making installations.

Rail: So this is the origin story of your art?

Köhler: No, that was something like a preliminary sign, because it was two or three days before Jean-Michele Rousset came into his courtyard and took pictures. He was thinking, "Ah, maybe one day I will be someone people recognize for giving new value to thrown away things, using it to pass messages.”

Rail: But you had been doing these installations in your garden for quite some time before this event.

Adéagbo: As for the origin story, my family made me come back to Benin when my father died so I could become the head of the clan. But I said, “How can I be the head of the clan if I don’t have a good job and can’t make money?” So, my initial installations were petitions, basically, to let me go back to France again to study. I made them because my family took my passport away, they blocked me. I would lay them out in the family’s compound and also where other people would pass by, texts and objects like found shoes and T-shirts, but also lots of elaborate texts, questioning destiny and this and that. Also, in a way, they were votives or petitions so that passersby or family members would decide to let me go back to France. Because I was locked-down or locked-in basically, I needed help from a third person, not a family member, not myself, but someone else who would help me to leave.

Rail: An intercessor.

Adéagbo: I hoped a third person, an outsider, would see them and say, “‘How can you lock this guy up? He’s writing interesting things.” And that’s what happened in April 1993 when Rousset came.

Rail: Reaching back to Warburg, you both share an interest in expressions of strong emotions like longing, frustration, ambition, joy, or excitement, which he charted in his Mnemosyne Atlas. But Warburg linked images drawn from different times and cultures that directly depicted these emotions. You, however, seem to reach for more collective emblems of these emotions. You tend to collect and make images and objects that point to the ways human tragedies and triumphs are processed in cultures. Examples in your installation at the Kunsthalle include newspaper articles pointing out the struggles of feminists in France and queer communities in Africa, and a juxtaposition of two books with cheerful, photo-based covers—one entitled Questions About German History, the other Namibia—that point obliquely to a brutal colonial history of exploitation and oppression. Your great skill, I think, is finding a new way to infuse your own subjectivity, that of an African artist living and working in Benin and Hamburg, in an investigation of what you might call the “hive minds” of the two cultures you inhabit.

Adéagbo: No matter where you are, objects have a creative power, a life of their own. I find a shirt thrown away in the street: someone liked the shirt, bought it, but then why did they throw it away? How did it end up here on the street? But the first objects I put together were a box of cigarettes and a matchbox.

Köhler: Why?

Adéagbo: The cigarettes, they are expensive. They could consider themselves more important. The matches are in a small box, and they’re very cheap compared to the cigarettes. But on the other hand, how could you light or smoke the cigarettes if you didn’t have the little matches? So I put things together to show their complementarity. And this is also true of people because someone who is considered unimportant could be essential for someone else. So, there are all different kinds of value, but it’s the connection or the complementarity that gives value to both of them. So that’s the object part of it.

Rail: To extend the metaphor, you light all kinds of fuses in your installations. Two subtexts in this installation are Hamburger Kunsthalle and the city of Hamburg. And after the Second World War, three directors of the Kunsthalle, each of which is depicted in your installation in a portrait painted by a Beninese artist, devoted much of their time to replacing works of modern art that were confiscated and sold by the Nazis. And Hamburg was a city built on shipping and trade that played a large role in the global slave trade and extraction of resources during the colonial era. Can you talk about these subjects, how you folded them into the work?

Adéagbo: I come back to the Warburg family history and how wise Aby Warburg was to not stay in the family business, to take distance and to say “I don’t want to mess around with this banking heritage.” I feel like the Hamburger Kunsthalle is in a way like a family house. It’s a collective house. I mean, it’s like a collective house of a tribe, or this tribe of the Hamburg people. It’s not a remote institution, it’s owned by the people. So it’s their house.

Köhler: What’s the role of the museum directors?

Adéagbo: Each director leaves their footprint on an institution, their ideas of what Hamburg needs at a certain moment, and their notion of what culture and art can mean for the citizens.

Rail: And you’ve singled out Johann Heinrich Füssli’s painting Der Gerächte [The Avenger] of 1806–07, which is explicitly about slavery. What story does it tell you, or what questions does it ask? What interested you about this image?

Adéagbo: It shows the shipwreck of a slave trader’s vessel in a tempest—slaves swim free but are still in danger, fighting the waves. One slave stands on a rock and holds a white woman that he saved in his arms. He could have let her drown, yet why did he save her? Even if someone did something terrible to you, can you find a way to forgive? He won because he did not let himself be caught in hate and revenge.

Rail: We’ve spoken about the aspect of recycling in your work. Many people have also compared your installations with their casual but carefully considered arrangements of displays of goods to outdoor marketplaces in Cotonou. Earlier, though, you mentioned that your installations are also offerings. I’d like to talk about the religious or spiritual aspect of your work. Are they Vodoun offerings, which I believe are a little bit like Catholic votives?

Adéagbo: They are spaces to ask questions. Someone who’s considered to be a madman or crazy, they’re always being chased away, pushed away. You’re excluded, you’re marginalized from the family. And that’s what happened to me. Until this curator Jean-Michele came and took pictures, which changed my life. So events and things that happen can be altars. It’s not only a physical idea of an altar, but also a conglomeration of precious moments: the altar of events that influence your life positively. So it’s an immaterial idea of an altar.

Rail: It seems to me that your work tries to memorialize or preserve the energies of people and events. You see this in the portraits of Warburg and the Kunsthalle directors and in the anonymous articles of women’s clothing that are pinned to the walls.

Adéagbo: Our stumbling block is our vanity. Our vanity and the self-conceit of thinking we have everything or we can control everything. I feel I am the savior of things.

Rail: How so?

Adéagbo: Some things that were marginalized or thrown away, I give them a new function, a new home. Your guardian angel must stay your guardian angel. Sometimes people help people, but then they try to dominate saying, “I help you, so you do what I ask.” So an artwork has to contain a form of instruction, to give you something to work on, or give you some input that you can work with.

Rail: What are some of the things that you hope the exhibition sets in motion? For instance, what might the female mannequin that greets the viewer at the entrance signify?

Adéagbo: It’s about complementarity, your partner, the partner that is destined for you.

Köhler: But it’s part of his life story that he wanted to marry in France, a woman called Annette, but the parents in Benin and the family said there’s no way he could marry in France. He had to get a wife in Benin. So maybe it also represents the partner that Georges was destined to have and didn’t have.

Rail: Something like the Eternal Feminine from Goethe?

Adéagbo: It’s the departure point, the beginning of the story. The woman is the point of departure, of creation.

Rail: Did you call her the Hostess, Stephan?

Köhler: Yes, I call her the Hostess, because she’s standing there and she welcomes people. That’s my interpretation.

Rail: You have said that you don’t read all of the books you use in your installations, many of which are thick ethnographic or historical texts. Their covers function as paintings or they’re something like Duchamp’s readymades. But then there are newspaper and magazine articles about cultural struggles or developments pinned to the wall that you have clearly read and internalized their significance. To me, this play of surface and content in your work says a lot about the way we move through life. We go deep on a few things but only graze the surface of so much of the information that surrounds us. We only catch the headlines, so to speak.

Köhler: Information flashes by.

Rail: Yes, I love that sensation of your installations. It, to me, recreates that play of surface and depth that we all experience.

Köhler: In cognition, yeah.

Rail: I watched a video of you speaking about your exhibition in Berlin at the KINDL in 2019. You talked about your art being like medicine. I would love to hear about that.

Adéagbo: If you cannot tell the doctor where your pain is, what you’re suffering, then the doctor can’t help you. The first step is to describe your symptoms or your illness. So it’s the same principle when someone asks me to create an installation for an art institution. It’s the same metaphor basically as medicine, of saying I need this for myself or for my institution. And then I make you the mix. So whatever God has created has life and can breathe and live. But what human beings create can never be a living organism. Human beings can create machines and robots and this and that, but not a new animal.

Rail: But they can create art, which some would say does live and breathe. Warburg seems to have believed that artistic expressions made in Athens millennia ago somehow live in art today.

Adéagbo: You saw that in the installation. There’s a text, and it says ne suis pas artiste. People call themselves artists, but I don’t call myself an artist. The others who call themselves artists, what do they know about art? I’m not an artist. You cannot and should not judge what you do and declare it as art. Just do it, and see the effect. Art must have an instructive value. What I make is not decorative. It’s not just there to be visually pleasing. So I don’t care if it’s beautiful; it’s important that it triggers the viewers to reflect on what they are doing, what they are meant to do, if they are on the path of fulfilling their potential. So the life of Aby Warburg is an artwork.

Rail: If you’re not an artist, what do you call yourself?

Adéagbo: I have to do it. I have to make it and present it to the people around me. As I’m doing it, it’s not up to me, saying that I can do it well. An outsider has to come and see what I’m doing, and make the judgment whether I did a good job.

Rail: Does that make you a medium?

Adéagbo: It’s a mission I have. You should not boast yourself or say “I can do this.” Just do it and then let others see what they can get out of it.

Rail: So it’s your vocation, you are called to do this?

Adéagbo: It’s like art is in nature and art calls the person to give it a physical form to invite people to think about themselves and their relations to others and their world.

Rail: Are you an arbiter of sorts—someone whose decisions about what parts of culture are worthy of our attention?

Köhler: Do you mean an arbitre, someone who is an authoritative mediator between things?

Adéagbo: Yes and no, I do not create a hierarchy of important and less important parts of culture. Pop music hangs next to classical music, there is no high and low culture. Mediating and exploring different mentalities, finding their common elements is what I do.

Rail: Yes. I’m interested in the process by which you choose what to put on view in an installation like Aby Warburg’s work of art. In it, you’re mediating between permanence and provisionality. You include ephemeral things like newspaper articles and articles of clothing but also things that are more permanent like books or the paintings that you have made in Benin or the album covers by a band called the Hamburg Oldtime All-Stars. There is something in your work that speaks to both the span of our attention and of our lives.

Adéagbo: Or even hearing beautiful music at a fun party or club or something, you have your records, and you’re memorializing a feeling of joy. Lots of people have Spotify on their phones and use it to listen to the albums on the wall in the installation.

Rail: There are monumental and memorial qualities, and there is a lot of playfulness and humor. In several passages on the gallery walls, you use high-heeled shoes as framing devices—two times around carved wooden figures of African men. I wonder: are you a visual poet?

Adéagbo: Educator and poet. Yes, there are poems without words, just with things.

Rail: Your installations use the same kind of fast-moving associative logic as poetry.

Köhler: Yes. Material metaphors. They are much faster than words. I wrote about this in my dissertation on Georges, “The Tribunal of Things” (“Das Tribunal der Dinge”). It’s online on the server of the Hamburg University library. I used that title because Georges often describes his installations as being like a court session, with proofs and evidence of things that happened.

Rail: Presenting the evidence.

Adéagbo: I put out every piece of evidence and the visitor can judge. Traces of decisions and attitudes of people.

Rail: Please tell me about humor too.

Adéagbo: When I observe visitors, a lot of them are smiling. So when people leave with a smile, it gives me a good feeling and saying yeah, I did a great work that makes people feel good.

Köhler: Georges also talks about his work being like archaeology.

Adéagbo: Archaeology is a science that discovers the mysteries that made up or governed a person, a city, or a country or a society. So what I’m doing is like mental archaeology.

Rail: Did you know about the Situationists in Paris in the late sixties and their “dérives,” or “drifts,” which were unplanned explorations of cities and their psychogeographies?

Köhler: Georges came to France in 1968.

Rail: Was that an influence, the student uprisings and air of revolution at the time?

Adéagbo: No, I was not interested in art at that time, I just wanted to study. But my art comes from the street. It is not made in or for museums. It comes from a society, from a city.

Rail: So far we’ve spoken about permanence and ephemerality, surface and depth. Certainly there are almost magical leaps of logic that call to mind Surrealism and the great proto-Surrealist writer Comte de Lautréamont’s famous quote about the “chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.” Yet at the same time the work is extremely rational—suffused with enlightenment values of truth and discernment. The books and articles you arrange in brilliantly self-critical groupings track important histories and new cultural directions. This contrast between human craziness and brilliance is one of your work’s great animating forces.

Adéagbo: There’s a very different cognitive aspect, like the way people move and discover my installations, with the diversity of objects and origins and strands of thought, is very different than looking at a single painting of artist, where you say, “Oh, this is a Max Beckmann, or this is Vincent van Gogh.” This is a challenge in a way.

Rail: It’s a challenge, but it’s one that you can take on at a variety of different speeds. I could spend two days in there reading everything and doing background research. Or I could go in there for half an hour and see the free play of ideas and feel the echoes of all the consciousnesses that are referenced in the work. Either way, I’d come away with an amazing feeling about life and civilization.

Köhler: A vibration.

Rail: Exactly.

Adéagbo: If you go to a museum, you can use it as a school or as a place for oracles. Why do people go to museums? Maybe they look for advice, an oracle. They sacrifice time that they could work, or relax, so they search for answers.

Rail: Maybe it’s an altar to knowledge and wonder. When I look at your work, I think of the old days of library card catalogs. You’d be researching a subject and would see a publication that was adjacent, alphabetically or topically, and it would spark new connections. Somehow these feel more real and important than what you call the rapid-fire “zapping” between topics and context that we now do on the internet. Also, even though you compare the arrows in your short handwritten texts to computer cursors, it’s worth pointing out that you also slow down the consumption of images in works like Aby Warburg’s work of art. The artists you work with in Benin make paintings and sculptures from images you send them. They’ve metabolized your images and the figures in them. They’ve gone through their minds and come out through their hands.

Köhler: For an exhibition in Stockholm, Georges sent an image of a famous painting of the oldest painting of the city of Stockholm to a painter in Benin. This artist sent back a big panel in which the Swedish houses became huts, basically.

Rail: Yeah. That’s only fair because Albrecht Dürer drew a rhinoceros based on reports from an early visitor to Africa, and he came up with something that seems to be half dinosaur. In this work, those cultural distortions, and connections and failures to connect flow both ways from Benin to Hamburg and back again. Understanding and misunderstanding can be so close.

Köhler: Precisely. Misunderstanding is part of the theme.

Adéagbo: It’s also like going to a marketplace. You spend money. Maybe you look for something, and maybe look for an answer or you want to leave a prayer. It’s a cheap place to get a lot of inspiration, a museum. You go there, and you take something home, you get a gift or encouragement to move through your life, a kind tap on your shoulder to keep going.