The relationship between Europe and the Tropics has largely been one of colonial encounter and ethnographic contact that, before turning in its current self-critical, post-exoticist, post-enlightenment direction, legitimised imperialism through its ‘scientific’ findings. More recently, after the decline of the colonial order, the ‘discovery’ of mass poverty in the so-called ‘third world’ came about, resulting in the ‘infantilisation’ of the countries in the Tropics region. The discourse of development therefore, as noted by Arturo Escobar [i], emerged as a strategy to restructure the relationships between the colonies and metropolitan centers. Throughout the diverse history of the tropics, various fantasies have been projected onto them and even Claude Lévi-Strauss took with him to Brazil a heavy load of preconceptions, even though they gradually fell apart as he discovered what he would later call the ‘sad tropics’. Tourist clichés and Disney versions of exotic paradises have also been abundant, with a recent manifestation being the ‘Tropical Islands’ theme park in the city of Brandenburg. An oversized silver dome that promises to bring South Pacific vibes and Caribbean heat waves to the chilly corner of east Germany, by housing a ‘tropical island’ with warm, moist air, a huge pool, artificial rain, and even huts offering juices and drinks. All this, without having to encounter the ‘favelas’ and insects that are so ‘annoying’ in the real tropical regions.

Working against such a burdened background of tropical identity, constructed as it is by the European collective imagination, the exhibition The Tropics: Views from the Middle of the Globe at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin, organised by the Goethe Institute in Rio de Janeiro and the Berlin Ethnological Museum, brings together 130 works from the equatorial region, created in ‘pre-modern’ times and on loan from the Ethnological Museum, and the works of 40 contemporary artists from across the globe who deal with the tropics as their theme.

As stated by the curators, Alfons Hug, director of the Goethe Institute in Rio de Janeiro, Peter Junge, and Viola König, curator and director of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin respectively, the exhibition is an effort to ‘re-determine the North-South dialogue’. Its declared aim is to ‘re-aestheticise the subject of the tropics, not to look at them from a political and economic viewpoint for once, but to concentrate on culture as a counterweight’.

The overall methodology of the exhibition is based on Levi Strauss’ travelogues Mythologiques and his structural study of Myths, in order to interlink ‘pre-modern’ and contemporary art, however fragmentary, intermittent, or chaotic their relationship may be. According to Strauss, Myth, as language, consists of both ‘langue’ and ‘parole’, both the ‘synchronic, ahistorical structure’ and the specific ‘diachronic details within the structure’ (Strauss, 1995) [ii]. The notion of Myth is built into the exhibition’s form, suggesting a deeper relationship or kinship between the works than mere resemblance or formal juxtapositions. The exhibition is constructed around seven thematic groups: After the flood, The Short Life, The Broken Arrow, The Color of Birds, The Forbidden Laughter, Tropical Baroque and The Urban Drama.

Entering the exhibition space, one encounters Franz Ackermann’s large scale installation, Terminal Tropical, 2008, an abstract topography of an exotic destination where global exoticism, tourist spectacle, apathetic voyeurism, ecological concerns, and paradisial utopias meet. The title Paradise has an ironic undertone in Thomas Struth’s photograph of the Peruvian jungle Paradies 32, 2005. Struth’s lens literally focuses on wild nature, questioning representations of paradise throughout history. The entire surface of the photograph is crisscrossed and covered by thick vegetation that forms an impenetrable verdant barbwire, a ‘green hell’, as formidably described by Werner Herzog in Aguirre.

Caio Reisewitz’s photographs, Palm Tree Garden III and Santuario San Pedro Claver IV, 2007, portray the domesticated tropical nature surrounding colonial buildings. The artist’s images suggest one of the genealogies of the enlightenment: the systematisation of nature and more specifically the conversion of raw nature into a controlled ‘system of nature’. Caio Reisewitz’s gesture is echoed in Candida Hofer’s photographic series Zoological Garden, 1992, in which animals from the tropics, sorted in identical adjacent cages are put on display in European and North American zoos.

Encapsulating a literal interaction between nature/culture, the room-size installation of Gerda Steiner & Jorg Lenzlinger, The Office, 2007, illustrates a microcosm of the foregoing exhibition strategy. The viewer has to physically penetrate the installation that is set in a tropical scenario with plastic plants creeping and growing in disorder in all directions. The materials used by the artists are extensive: organic and inorganic materials of all kinds, multicolor plastic and real plants, dry leaves, tree branches, colored artificial fertiliser and crystal structures. The uncontrolled vegetation grows over office furniture, computers and telephone cables, creating a setting that seems to be summarised well in the statement: challenge nature and it hits back.

Elsewhere, Candida Hofer captures the conservation room of an ethnographic museum where ‘tribal’ art, inspected by the clinical hand of science, becomes the object of an organising and controlling ethnographic gaze. The masks worn by the ethnographers partially conceal their facial expressions pointing to their gaze. Hofer’s image is juxtaposed with Marcos Chaves’s video installation Mask, 2005, where the artist wears a latex carnival mask with a grotesquely over-sized mouth, while he bursts into horrifying laughter.

The coloniser makes a more explicit appearance in the video of Australian artist REA maang, 2006, that focuses on the British nuclear tests that were carried out in the 1950s in Central Australia, and its physical impact on the Pitjantjatjara People, the traditional owners of the bombed land. Similarly, South African artist Guy Tillim follows the traces of devastation in Central Africa from the gold mines of Katanga to the ruined Palaces of Zaire’s dictator Mabutu.

What follows is a showcase of cultural diffusion as curator Viola König groups garments, costumes and masks from Guatemala, Peru, India and Sri Lanka under the heading ‘Colors and Sounds of the Tropics’ that allow an examination of the common features of art from the tropics.

The exhibition ends with the theme of the ‘Urban Drama’, comprised solely of contemporary works. In contrast to the ominous title that predisposes the viewer to confront dystopic doomsday images of the tropical mega-cities, as projected in the mass media, emphasis is placed instead on urban dynamics. Navin Rawanchaikul’s painting installation Lost in the City, 2007, depicts the emergence of informal economies as a kind of urban survival, picturing diverse forms of urban street culture that index locale and agency. The burdens of the sociopolitical circumstances — increased urbanisation, population explosion and displacement — are not concealed in Adriano Domingues sculpture, Abrigo/Manifesto, 2008, yet another homeless vehicle.

The exhibition is carefully organised so as to avoid reproducing the modernist exoticism of its methodological predecessor, Primitivism in 20th century art: Affinity of the tribal and the Modern at the MoMA in 1984. One of its shortcomings however is that the ‘pre-modern’ artworks are often consumed by the contemporary works. Further, the assertion about not including a political and economic viewpoint and concentrating on culture is vexing since such a scenario — if it could materialise, the thought being, that if that separation was possible — would impede the critical strategies of the participating artists. However the exhibition does not avoid addressing some hard, uncomfortable issues, and by transcending the cultural context, time and history, it provides a captivating visual incoherence that is not in itself unrewarding and at times is even challenging. To draw to a close, the exhibition does not seem to fulfill its declared ambition to ‘re-aesthetisise’ the tropics, rather it provides a commonplace vision of the tropical universe and maybe it is for the best. To re-aesthetise the tropics is a challenging endeavour and ultimately any claim of re-aesthetisation originating from a European context, no matter if it is in good faith, might result in yet another construction.


[i] Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development. Princeton University Press, NJ, 1998.
[ii] Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture, Shocken, NY, 1995.