How can painting respond to current political events and their historical backgrounds? This is the question Dierk Schmidt has been exploring since the mid-1990s in his painting installations.
In his series Die Teilung der Erde – Tableaux zu rechtlichen Synopsen der Berliner Afrika-Konferenz (The Division of the Earth – Tableaux on the Legal Synopses of the Berlin Africa Conference), Schmidt explores guilt and coming to terms with it via the example of colonialism and its consequences. Three images refer to the West Africa Conference of 1884/85 when 14 European countries and the USA met in Berlin to draw up a policy regarding their interests on the African continent which they largely considered to be a no-man’s-land. The General Act signed at the conference provided the basis for the occupation of the continent, the oppression of its people and the exploitation of its raw materials by the European powers.
Schmidt examines how the relationship between factual legal documents and their brutal consequences can be translated into the pictorial. To distance himself from the colonial rhetoric of the texts, he develops a sign system in which the abstract language of the law is graphically transported into the abstraction of painting and the physicality of the silicone paint used. Three paintings depict the French-language agreements of the Acte Général and the process of the disenfranchisement of the African population. A further painting addresses the genocide of the Herero and Nama people committed by the German Empire’s military in Namibia between 1904 and 1908; another painting unveils the developments of international law with regard to questions of reparation. A smaller painting from this cycle from 2005 shows Russian President Vladimir Putin and Alpha Oumar Konaré, then President of the African Union, at the 2005 G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. At this meeting of the largest economies, the dependency of African developing countries, debt relief and development aid were key issues. Map legends which are based on political and legal documents and to which the pictures allude are laid out on a table. The reduction in colour and motifs creates a pictorial space in which the structural violence of colonialism is revealed.
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