French-Beninese artist Roméo Mivekannin blends European pictorial traditions with critical reflections on Black identity, memory, and colonial violence, distancing himself ironically from canonical art history to reveal its blind spots. For his first solo institutional exhibition in Germany, at the Kunsthalle Giessen, he presents an installation inspired by Hitler's unfinished “Führermuseum” project, highlighting the relationships between art, fascism, and colonialism, as well as the political role of cultural institutions. At the same time, his work is part of a spiritual healing process: as heir to King Behanzin, Mivekannin incorporates voodoo practices into his paintings and ceramics, which are designed as vehicles for purification and memory repair.
Dr. Nadia Ismail, Director Kunsthalle Giessen + Curator of the exhibition.

For years, Taysir Batniji has explored the theme of exile through works combining photography, video, drawing, sculpture, and installation. His work, marked by impermanence and fragility, oscillates between the visible and invisible, the concrete and abstract. Although tending toward a universal dimension, his work remains intimately linked to Palestinian history and tragedy. The exhibition at the Palazzina dei Giardini Ducali traces this poetic and painful exploration of memory, traces, and absence. Inspired in particular by Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian artist conceives of “inhabiting time” as a response to the impossibility of inhabiting space.

Exhibition curator : Daniele De Luigi.

Benin round trip. Perspectives on Dahomey in 1930 offers a reinterpretation of the films and photographs produced during a mission by the Archives de la Planète led by Catholic missionary Francis Aupiais and cameraman Frédéric Gadmer in Dahomey (now Benin) from January to May 1930. An immersion in the form of a Franco-Beninese dialogue that questions the way non-European cultures are viewed, in a context of colonial rule and the birth of ethnography.

Exhibition curators: Julien Faure-Conorton and David-Sean Thomas.