Museum für Kunst & Gewerbe Hamburg

Looking back, how are we to interrogate the violent practices of the colonial era today? How can wounds be made visible – in order to start the process of healing? In her first exhibition in Germany, the young Egyptian artist Sara Sallam – who lives in the Netherlands – addresses these questions in new works developed especially for the MK&G Hamburg, exploring the museum’s archaeological and photographic collection and its colonial legacy across three sections: “On Mourning”, “On Expulsion”, and “On Resistance”. 

Sallam’s research-based practice includes photography, video, text, archival interventions, and artist’s books. In her multimedia installations and publications, she often develops counter-narratives to the historical accounts put forward by colonial contexts. For the work Suturing Wounds (an ongoing series launched in 2024), for example, the artist has compiled Coptic textiles from the MK&G’s collection of antiquities into a hand-sewn tunic, which she then models in photographic self-portraits. Here, the act of excavating and fragmenting artefacts is countered by the activities of assembling and sewing – a gesture of resistance that is at the same time a healing ritual with which Sallam commemorates her unknown ancestors. 
This exhibition is framed in the Reconsidering Photography series within the Photography and New Media Collection at the MK&G, which seeks to critically examine gaps in the museum’s holdings by means of contemporary artistic interventions. The museum’s long-term aim is to expand and diversify the collection with works by photographers with a migrant background.

This exhibition is curated by Dr Esther Ruelfs.