How can advertising for car tyres, animal feed, and coffee houses function as both the mirror and driving force behind a colonial, imperialistic worldview? In a research project, the Kunstbibliothek (Art Library) has systematically examined an entire group of posters in its collection in order to identify references to colonial influence and racist content.
Around 3,800 posters in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’s Graphic Design Collection at Kunstbibliothek, dating from 1840 to 1914, were catalogued as part of a digitisation project in 2021‒22. They not only document the beginnings of poster art in Europe and the United States as popular advertising media but also reflect the period from which they originate ‒ an era of industrialisation characterised by innovation and liberalisation as much as colonialist expansion and patriarchal structures. Their imagery is underpinned by ideological perspectives, social conditions and values which we regard with critical distance today.
Aim of the digitisation project was to publish all data and images on the internet. However, the newly gained overview revealed that numerous posters could not simply be put online – rather, their discriminatory motifs or hidden narratives called for contextualisation. This insight gave rise to the decolonial inventory project: the entire group of posters was systematically examined for colonial connections – with the result that around one in ten posters showed such references: from product advertising for cocoa, tea and other “colonial goods” to zoo animals and tourism, from cultural advertising for expedition reports to human zoos or colonial exhibitions. A team of three researchers then selected 240 representative posters and analysed them in detail, decoding imagery and considering aspects of ideology, history, politics and economics. The following questions served as a guideline:
Based on the analysis of 240 posters, the research findings clearly illustrate how closely colonialism, consumption and advertising were intertwined in the era of industrialisation. They show that historical advertising – reflecting a new consumer culture and global trade economics – not only evokes places, events and actors of colonialism, but also introduces Orientalism, exoticism and racist stereotypes into everyday life and the street scene of the countries where they originated with their colourful motifs. With their memorable images, simple language and mass reproduction, advertising visuals contributed to the spread and consolidation of a Eurocentric and hierarchical worldview that continues to have an impact today.
In order to enable diverse approaches to the subject matter, the results are published in three interlinked parts:
The decision to publish the research findings in a free and permanently accessible online format was made deliberately in order to reach a broad public. The aim of the project is to open up anti-discriminatory and decolonial perspectives on a collection and to encourage similar research. The medium of the poster – which continues to shape our everyday lives today – is particularly well suited to questioning and breaking down viewing habits ignorant of exploitative visual tropes.
To mark the publication of the research project, the Kunstbibliothek, in collaboration with the Deutsches Historisches Museum, is hosting the symposium “Tenacious Tropes: Colonial Narratives in Visual Advertising” at Kulturforum. It addresses the question of how visual patterns that emerged around 1900 continued into the 20th and 21st centuries. Three city tours and fifteen lectures will analyse international evidence of colonial contexts in image-based advertising media from the 1860s to the 2020s, from “stereotypography” and exoticism in AI images to the “Oriental” marketing of food, travel and houseplants, and the instrumentalisation of black bodies. Striking continuities become apparent: many stereotypes have been perpetuated for more than a hundred years.
Scholarly Team: Dr Ibou Coulibaly Diop, Dr Kristina Lowis, Dr Christina Thomson
Project Manager: Dr Christina Thomson
Collection: Graphic Design Collection, Kunstbibliothek ‒ Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Project Development: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Duration: 1 February 2022 to 31 December 2024
Online presence: available since 10 November 2025