Kapwani Kiwanga’s installation cited the gridded skylight of the exhibition room on the second floor the Albertinum, in which a series of paintings by the artist Max Slevogt is exhibited. This was created in 1914 on a trip to Egypt and depicts light-flooded scenes and landscapes in brilliant colors.

Kiwanga positions an illuminated, gridded cuboid centrally in the space. The intensity of the light is based on whether data from Egypt and illuminates an arrangement of differently colored, large panels, that borrow the colors from two paintings from Slevogt’s series (“Sudanese Women” and “Morning near Luxor”).

The range from facets of the bright blue of the sky, to ochre colored, sandy earth tones up until those colors used to define the skin of two Sudanese women. From a decolonial perspective, Kiwanga focuses on the relationship of a distant real space to an image space defined by colors and the exhibition space as well as related questions of perception.