MADAD Featured in Goethe Institut's “Shaping The Past / Inscribing The Future” Exhibit

As a capstone to our fellowship experience with Monument Lab and the Goethe Institut, the MADAD Collective of St. Louis (De Nichols, Damon Davis, Mallory Nezam) was featured in a new exhibition by Goethe’s Montreal organization. “Shaping The Past / Inscribing The Future” features works by several of the 2020 ML fellowship cohort, as we reflect on our artworks that engage topics of spatial justice, memorialization, and public art within our local communities.

Exhibit Notes by Goethe Institut Montreal

Shaping the Past

Shaping the Past is a platform for transnational memory culture at the intersection of art, history, and justice. Based around the Monument Lab Fellows program, the exhibition features artists, activists, and collectives from North America and Germany whose work broadens understandings and illuminates ongoing memory interventions that reimagine civil society around the world. --Monument Lab

Shaping the Past is a partnership of the Goethe-Institut North America, Monument Lab, and the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Agency for Civic Education). The project connects to the activist and artistic work of local, national, and transnational movements as a reflection of memory culture and discusses new perspectives on forms of memory.

Inscribing in the Present

Curator: Diane Gistal for Nigra Iuventa

Inscribing in the Present critically reflects on the power of commemorative communities. Despite their different backgrounds, Montreal artists Karen Tam and Moridja Kitenge Banza enter into a remarkable dialogue and perform an act that is as poetic as it is political: they inscribe their past in our present, reminding us that history can also be carried by those who commemorate it.