Through the thematic explorations of her artistic practice, Maimuna Adam examines the relationship between spatiality, narration, and history, and how they intersect with questions of identity, migration, and memory. She works with paper, found books, charcoal, coffee, and canvases to produce installations and video art that seek to connect real and imagined histories to present-day memories and identities. She experiments with coffee as a painting medium, enabling her to approach the material both conceptually as well as historically and how it travels across the world due to its localities of production and global consumption. For this exhibition, her installation Writing (a future with the remnants of the past) (2023) explores the loss and abandonment felt by madgermanes—Mozambican workers contracted out to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as labourers—during and after their stay in the GDR. The work includes a handmade book made of newspaper clippings, existing book objects, and other printed material from the GDR and the People’s Republic of Mozambique (PRM), with fold-outs encompassing different paper techniques. Sculptural papier mâché elements, echoing the forms of tools and cogs and made from the same print ephemera, also intervene in the handmade book. Through various entry points such as conversations with Dito Tembe (a Mozambican artist working in the GDR between 1984–89), poems by Regina Vera Cruz (a Mozambican poet who worked there between 1988–1990), as well as graphic works and book-objects from Guillermo Deisler (a Chilean artist working there between 1983–1995), she explores questions of exile and labour. Archival materials from Deisler as well as a poetic collage conversation with Cruz are shown on screens as part of the installation. The complexities of homecoming are examined through the experience of the madgermanes who unintentionally became the subjects of political relationships built between the GDR and the PRM.

Commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), co-produced by Maimuna Adam and HKW, 2023–24.

Work in the exhibition: Writing (a future with the remnants of the past) (2023), installation comprising book-object (papier-mâché technique, newspaper, card, fabric, found book and colour laser print on acetate), suitcases and screens, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist