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Andreas Nur

Work by Andreas Nur

Screenshot from ID by Andreas Nur (2021) 

Building on his practice as a music video producer Andreas Nur has created a tribute to remixing as an aesthetic approach. His work ID moves back and forth between the idiosyncratic and the impersonal. Applied to the photographic archive of the Museum of Ethnography and its narrow focus on cultural and racial difference, exotic customs, and seemingly random geographies, the installation—through the tempo and variety of the many images projected—seeks to create a place beyond information, knowledge, morality, and time. The collage stitches together fragments of sound, music, video, images, which the artist has excavated from the museum’s archive, the internet, and the (now hidden) permanent exhibition on the installation site.  

With a sober gaze reflecting the involuntary detachment from the African continent that those who are born in the diaspora must often live with, Andreas Nur’s work takes on an existential condition which the Caribbean scholar Édouard Glissant saw as the impossibility of return: “The motherland is also for us the inaccessible land” (Glissant 1989:160). In the same way as he is confronting this possibly painful realization, Andreas Nur does not avoid including in his work some of the more stereotypical representations of Africans found in the photographic archive. Instead, he embraces them and asks the viewer to assess their truthfulness honestly.