Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig

Family Matters
19.06.–14.09.2025

The thematic exhibition Family Matters explores family memories in the migration society and their links to socio-political and historical issues that manifest themselves both locally and globally. It brings together ten contemporary (post-)migrant positions that take personal family stories as the starting point for their artworks. All ten are united by the approach of shining a spotlight on personal archives and thus formulating questions about the past for the future; the works on display address individual and collective experiences ranging from colonial exploitation and political upheavals to questions of migration and assimilation policies.

Re-Connect.Art and struggle in the brother land
From 18 May to 10 September 2003, the MdbK presented a three-part exhibition on the history of immigration to the GDR and its consequences. The first part presented works by artists from the so-called socialist brother countries. The second part of the exhibition was dedicated to the promotion of young artists. The MdbK gave young artists with (post-)migrant biographical references to the GDR the opportunity to present their work as part of a group exhibition. Philipp Farra (*1991, Schönebeck (Elbe), Germany), Minh Duc Pham (*1991, Bad Schlema, Germany), Alina Simmelbauer (*1981, Sömmerda, Germany), Sarnt Utamachote (*1992, Thailand) and Phuong Phan (*1988, Hanoi, Vietnam) deal in their works with their own family biographies and the topic of migration, among other things. The tabooed racism in the GDR as well as the living conditions of contract workers, foreign students and their descendants were addressed in the last part of the exhibition:
The exhibition was voted ‘Exhibition of the Year 2023’ by AICA Deutschland e.V., the German section of the International Association of Art Critics AICA (Association Internationale des Critiques d'Art).

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

In nineteenth-century European painting and sculpture, the depiction of Black women from either Africa or the Caribbean, is relatively rare. Those few who are represented typically go unnamed, their identities and biographies left unknown. The individual represented is often reduced to an ethnographic type, serving as a generic stand-in for the conditions and circumstances of an entire group of people. Such is the case with Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s sculptural bust, Why Born Enslaved! (1868), a complex and ambiguous work purportedly reflective of the sculptor’s assumed humanitarianism and anti-slavery sentiment. However, it is also a piece of art representative of the eroticized exploitation of the (Black) female body.

Modeled in 1868 and first produced in plaster, Why Born Enslaved! was subsequently cast in terracotta, bronze, and marble versions. The beauty and sensuality of the sculpture are pronounced, yet the subject rendered and what is enacted —that of violent enslavement of a Black woman— is horrific. Reminiscent of a sculpted fragment, the bust is a stand-in for the complete enslaved body. As such, it draws upon stereotypes of sexualizing the (Black) female body, forcing the viewer to reconcile the aesthetic pleasure elicited by the piece with the horror and brutality of slavery.

You can view and download the leaflet about the work and its background here.