Together with the Deutsches Historisches Museum, the Berlin Kunstbibliothek is organising the symposium “Tenacious Tropes: Colonial Narratives in Visual Advertising” on 21 and 22 November 2025 in the lecture hall at Kulturforum. It will be held in English and German simultaneously.
Moderation: Miriam Camara
9:30 am Registration
10 am Opening words of welcome by Moritz Wullen (Director of the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and Fritz Backhaus (Head of Collections, Deutsches Historisches Museum)
10:10 am Introduction to the City Tours | Ibou Coulibaly Diop and Lorraine Bluche, (Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin)
10:30 am City Tours: Colonial Imagery in the Public Space
In three city tours, participants of the conference will trace colonial imagery and corporate communication in the streets of Berlin – for example at the U-Bahn station Afrikanische Straße and the Ermelerhaus, named after the former tobacco manufacturer Wilhelm Ferdinand Ermeler (1784–1866). The tours are led by members of civil society initiatives and associations, including Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland e. V. (ISD-Bund e. V.), Berlin Postkolonial e. V. and RomaTrial e. V. For many years, these groups have worked towards making marginalized perspectives on German colonial history visible.
2 pm Christina Thomson (Head of the Graphic Design Collection, Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) | „That's just the way it was.” Introduction (German)
2:20 pm Matthias Struch (Head of the Poster and Postcard Collection, Deutsches Historisches Museum) | Collecting history (German)
2:30 pm Julia Arens (Graphic Designer, Amsterdam) | Stereotypography: “Colonial“ Letterforms and Food Advertising, 1890–2025 (German)
3 pm Joël Zouna Touomou (Art Historian, Université Paris Sciences et Lettres/Technische Universität Berlin) | “You the superstar, I’m the stage”: Colonial Imaginaries and Black Women‘s Bodies Economics (English)
4 pm Birgit Haehnel (Art and Textile Scholar, Universität Osnabrück) | Textile Constructions of White Dominance in Advertising (German)
4:30 pm Bryel Kerkhoff-Parnell (ERIF – the European Race and Imagery Foundation) | Locating Zwarte Piet: A timeline of blackface scavengery (English)
5 pm Joachim Zeller (Historian, Berlin) | Colonial Advertising collectibles: Pictures that lie (German | Digital)
Moderation: Miriam Camara
9:30 am Registration
10 am Franziska Bolz (Ethnologist and Art Historian, Universität Koblenz) | Green Roommates with Compass: A Houseplant Display in a DIY Store (German)
10:30 am Erna Anderson (American Studies Scholar and Author, Berlin) | Oriental Delights in Contemporary Swedish Advertising (English)
11:30 am Navneet Pratap (Historian, University of Delhi) | Advertising Empire: Visual Culture and the Making of Colonial India (English)
12 noon Katrin Peters-Klaphake (Head of the Photography Collection, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin) | Fascinating (Neo-) Colonialism? Ambivalent Emotions in the Production and Perception of Advertising Images (German)
2 pm Fabian Lehmann (Culture Scholar, Hochschule für Musik und Theater, Hamburg) | Generative, Creative, Conservative: Artificial Intelligence as a Mirror of Exoticizing Imagery (German | Digital)
2:20 pm Nuno Grancho (Architect and Architectural Historian, Iscte University Institute of Lisbon) | Appropriation and Afterlives: Colonial Violence in the Advertising Image of Goa (English)
2:50 pm Fernando Hage Soares (Art Scholar, Berlin/Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, São Paulo) | Souvenirs from Brazil: The Colonial Origins of a National Brand (English)
4 pm Minhee Seefried-Park (Art Historian, Freie Universität Berlin) | Purported Authenticity: Imperialist Images of Korea within the Framework of Japanese Orientalism (German)
4:30 pm Richard Tsogang Fossi (German Studies Scholar, Technische Universität Berlin) | What colonial images conceal from us and yet reveal! An outgrowth from the succulent house, Berlin 1914 (German)
5 pm Panel Discussion | Moderation: Ibou Coulibaly Diop
Advertising pervades the modern world: every day we are flooded with colourful images designed to encourage consumption. Burnt into our collective memory, they create a rich pool of images, feeding into a central advertising strategy: recognition. Constantly quoting itself, image-based advertising perpetuates visual patterns that often go back to its beginnings 150 years ago – to an era that, in Europe and North America, was characterised by imperialist thought and action. The new everyday luxuries that the late 19th century brought to the capitalist industrialised nations were based on global import trade and exploitative extraction of raw materials in colonised countries.
A research project at Kunstbibliothek has shown how intensely colonialist practice is reflected in early advertising. Early ads also illustrate a growing longing for ‘exoticism’ and the wide world, satisfied with cultural and leisure activities ranging from zoos and ethnological exhibitions to long-distance travel. Both – global production chains and expansive cultural consumption – can still be found today in the imagery and narratives of advertising, in which coffee farmers continue to smile away their underpayment, and cruise ships dock on white palm beaches.
The two-day symposium traces the origins of colonial narratives in visual advertising from the heyday of colonialism around 1900 to their developments in the 20th and 21st centuries. Evidence of colonial contexts in international image-based advertising media from the 1860s to the 2020s will be analysed in fifteen presentations:
Focus lies on the question of continuities: Each talk cites examples from the contemporary communication landscape in order to illustrate the continued impact of the historical. Deliberate breaks with unreflected patterns can also be addressed. A panel discussion will bring social perspectives into play and address issues of collecting. In this way, the profound effects and after-effects of colonialism in visual communication are demonstrated, and a contribution is made to the decolonialisation of collection items and everyday culture.
The symposium will kick off with three site visits developed in collaboration with the Kompetenzstelle DeKolonisierung at Stiftung Stadtmuseum, which will explore traces of colonial imagery or corporate communication in the public space and introduce perspectives from outside the Eurocentric narrative. Berlin – as a capital with a colonialist past – is particularly suitable for such mapping. A video artist will accompany the tours and the symposium with his camera and process the footage into a film. The site visits and art video will be developed in collaboration with the Kompetenzstelle DeKolonisierung and Erinnerungsort Kolonialismus at Stiftung Stadtmuseum.
The symposium ‘Tenacious Tropes: Colonial Narratives in Visual Advertising’ will take place on 21 and 22 November 2025 in German and English (simultaneous translation provided). It is an on-site event (no stream or recording). Participation is free of charge and only possible after prior registration.
10 September to 18 November 2025 (or as long as places are available)
By e-mail to kolonialnarrative[at]smb.spk-berlin.de
Lecture hall at Kulturforum
Johanna-und-Eduard-Arnhold-Platz / Matthäikirchplatz, 10785 Berlin
The symposium “Tenacious Tropes: Colonial Narratives in Visual Advertising” is organised by the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Deutsches Historisches Museum, in cooperation with the Stiftung Stadtmuseum.
Dr. Christina Thomson | Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Matthias Struch | Deutsches Historisches Museum
Dr. Ibou Coulibaly Diop | Stadtmuseum, Erinnerungsort Kolonialismus
Dr. Lorraine Bluche | Stadtmuseum, Kompetenzstelle DeKolonisierung
If you have any questions, please contact kolonialnarrative[at]smb.spk-berlin.de
