Coumba Samba’s exhibition “deutschland” for the Kunstverein in Hamburg negotiates the intricate relationship between construction, kind, and color as constituents of coded methods of worldwide infrastructure. Monochromatic geometric types, stacked all through the gallery, evoke the visible language of worldwide provide chains, whereas directional strobe lights that lend the area a way of rhythm, mark pathways on the ground. The big container- like constructions sculptures relaxation at totally different levels of ease. Their inflexible geometries recall the compositions of early Twentieth-century summary geometric work. Samba’s set up, nevertheless, diverges from this art-historical precedent by lending the monochromes a way of coded that means and cultural resonance, remodeling “deutschland” into an opaque system whose logic stays elusive, like a glitching interface that by no means absolutely resolves. “deutschland” builds on Samba’s exhibition Pink Fuel (2024) at Arcadia Missa, London, wherein painted radiators develop into the endpoint and signifier of the Russian gasoline trade’s entanglement with the African and European continents. On the Kunstverein, the constructions evoke an analogous pressure between the static and materials residue amidst globalisation’s sleepless circulation. As ubiquitous symbols of worldwide commerce–now central to debates round U.S. tariff wars—additionally they interrogate the uneasy relationship between free commerce agreements and sovereignty, which worldwide provide chains willingly or unwillingly rework. On this context, the colors, chosen to resonate with each cultural and emotional connotations, develop into a language by way of which Samba dissects a world dominated by networks of capital. The strobing lights echo the structure of the stateless hub—guiding the circulation of products, knowledge, and other people. Viewers navigating the exhibition develop into members on this ecology, transferring by way of the area as if traversing a port or a terminal at night time—zones which are each materials and conceptual, and the place the logic of borders is more and more porous. This interaction—between the mechanical and the affective, between a way of course and being with out coordinates—reveals how infrastructure, usually unseen, involves mirror and outline human expertise inside huge, impersonal frameworks.
As this matrix of endpoints, distant nodes and opaque ideology strains beneath its personal logic and latently begins to warp, geometries of energy and place scramble. The place “deutschland” started as a metaphor for a way of locale inside a bigger community of flows, it turns into a disorientingly intimate expertise of globalisation’s distorting abstraction, as a system of navigation adrift, eroding the sense of geography that conjured it.
Curated by
Milan Ther
at Kunstverein Hamburg
till August 10, 2025
