Ludwig van Beethoven‘s death mask runs through the entire Neun Kelche project space in Theresa Weber‘s solo exhibition “Alle Menschen werden Brüder“. Again and again it is the central image element of her sculptural painting series “Ghost“ (60 x 60 cm), as well as the big scale paintings (200 x 160 cm). Details of the paintings also become a recurring pattern on the wallpaper “Beethoven Wall – Density of the forest“ (600 x 350 cm). In the density of its reproduction, the death mask becomes a symbolic forest landscape of pluralism. In the Beethoven series, Weber has been taking up the ongoing debate as to whether Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), one of the most famous European composers, could have had a Black background.

In her perspective as an artist with a Jamaican, German and Greek family background, Weber takes up the concept of the rhizome, as described by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as a further examination of diasporic identities. It describes a non-hierarchical network that creates connections beyond geographical and genealogical fixations. The rhizome spreads across space and time through a multitude of relationships and memories. This structure makes it possible to maintain a connection between ancestors and the present and to form a collective memory despite geographical separation. What happens when the surviving traces become visible in the
collective diasporic memory?

The six square paintings hung over the wallpaper are from Weber‘s new series “Ghost“. They almost seem like an echo of the rhizomatic wallpaper world and ask what ghosts our past still holds. The paintings in the room are composed of numerous paper prints of the death mask, acrylic paste, mosaic stones, marbles and acrylic nails. Van Beethoven‘s heads float individually or grouped next to and above each other like islands in an archipelago within a pattern that resembles coral reefs or roots. These islands, framed by a black ocean, can be seen particularly in the large-format paintings All People Become Brothers and Moonlight on the two transverse sides of the room.

The suspended costume objects “Woven Bodies“ (60 x 200 cm) represent the four elements and the body as network that is connected to community and nature. Two of them are being activated by dancers for the collaborative performance “9. Sinphonie und die Dichte des Waldes“ during Berlin Art Week.

Text by Kira Dell
Photo by Joanna Wilk
Curation by Kira Dell and Laura Seidel