Roundtable, Panel discussion, Presentation, Workshop and Performance focussing on “Archives in Motion”, memories of understanding and critical debates surrounding the hegemonic structures of museums and archives in the global art field.
Public Program
Friday, 20 June 2025
11:00 – 17:30
Free entry
Venue:
Heckmann-Höfe (5 min from ifa Gallery Berlin)
Entry via Oranienburger Str. 32 or Auguststr. 9
10117 Berlin
As part of the exhibition:
Survival Kit – Between Us and History: The Hidden Archive
Ken Aïcha Sy
20 Juni – 31 August 2025
#1 Presentation / Publication / Workshop
11:00
Anna Helfer in discussion with Lea Berger, Maya Makeda Buhlmann, Antonia Meija, and Chidimma Joy Giwa (Students of Art History in a Global Context: Africa, Freie Universität Berlin)
As part of this roundtable discussion, the students will present findings from the seminar Inside the Depots: Reflections on Research in Ethnographic Museums, developed in connection with the Survival Kit project and the exhibition at the ifa Gallery Berlin.
The discussion will center on three main areas: first, situating the seminar within the broader framework of Ken Aïcha Sy’s research project Survival Kit; second, sharing insights from field research conducted in the depots of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt and Iwalewahaus in Bayreuth, which holds a significant collection of contemporary Senegalese art; and third, reflecting on how the seminar engages with critical debates surrounding the hegemonic structures of museums and archives in the global art field—and exploring what forms of research might contribute to challenging or reshaping these institutional dynamics.
12:30 – Lunch time – Senegalese Meal by Ndeye Ndack Sarr
#2 Roundtable + Q&A
14:00
Conversation about “Archives in motion”.
Moderated by Anna Helfer
With Clémentine Deliss and Dior Thiam
Join researcher and curator Clémentine Deliss and artist Dior Thiam for a panel discussion on rethinking how we engage with archives and collections. Deliss will present her concept of the “metabolic museum,” while Thiam offers an artistic perspective rooted in memory, identity, and institutional critique. Together, they will explore how archives and collections can serve as active, generative sites for creative and critical practice.
#3 Sound Performance / Lecture / Conversation
15:30 – 17:00
Memory of understanding – Sound art practice embedded in archives, samples and African storytelling – The Ass Niang Collection
Listening Session with Elsa M’Bala aka A.M.E.T.
Sound artist Elsa M’Bala presents an immersive listening session featuring African sonic heritage from the Ass Niang Collection—an extraordinary archive of over 5,000 cassettes of African music gathered over five decades in Rufisque, Senegal. Collected by Ass Niang and his father, the tapes span a vast sonic landscape: Congolese rumba, Ghanaian Highlife, Senegalese ballack, Cameroonian Makossa, Arab music, and regional comedy and spoken word. The archive is both personal and political, offering insights into postcolonial memory, local knowledge production, and informal preservation practices. Now under M’Bala’s care, the archive becomes a living record of postcolonial African storytelling and grassroots preservation.
Elsa M’Bala—whose work bridges music, archival practice, and cultural repatriation—invites the audience to experience a carefully selected selection of cassettes in a shared, contemplative setting. Framed within Survival Kit, the session emphasizes listening as a critical method—engaging with music as both cultural document and site of resistance. The event invites curious listeners to consider how sound-based archives reframe dominant narratives and open up new approaches to decolonial research, heritage, and transnational collaboration.
M’Bala encourages us to travel through sound—to experience music not as a backdrop, but as a vessel for memory, connection, and understanding across histories and geographies.
Bios
Clémentine Deliss works across the borders of contemporary art, curatorial practice, and publishing. She is currently Curator at Large at KANAL-Centre Pompidou in Brussels, where she is preparing an exhibition of the Metabolic Museum-University for the opening in November 2026. She is also KANAL-Guest Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. Between 2020-23, she was Associate Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin. Her exhibition “Skin in the Game” included seminal prototypes by artists Ruth Buchanan, Otobong Nkanga, Collier Schorr, Rosemarie Trockel, Joëlle Tuerlinckx and Andrea Zittel. Between 2010–2015, she was Director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt/Main, where she instituted a new trans-disciplinary lab to remediate collections within a post-ethnological paradigm, working with artists, lawyers, and writers including Otobong Nkanga, Luke Willis Thompson, Tom McCarthy, and El Hadji Sy. Her book “The Metabolic Museum” (2020, Hatje Cantz) has been published in Russian (2021, Garage Museum), and Spanish (2023, Caniche Editorial, Madrid), and is forthcoming in Polish in 2025 (Zacheta National Museum of Art, Warsaw). Her last book “Skin in the Game. Conversations on Risk and Contention” was published in December 2023 by Hatje Cantz/KW. Since 1996, she has produced the artists’ and writers’ organ “Metronome” first published in Dakar.
Anna Helfer is a PhD candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin and the Leibniz Institute of Modern Orient (ZMO), supervised by Prof. Kai Kresse and Prof. Bénédicte Savoy. Her research focuses on art, memory, and postcolonial critique, with ongoing fieldwork in Dakar since 2018. From March 2024 to February 2025, she held the position of research associate at the Art History Institute of Freie Universität Berlin, Department of African Art. She has been a member of the project Re-connecting “Objects” (TU Berlin) since 2023, which was presented at Dak’Art 2024. From 2015 to 2017, she worked on the Städel Museum’s oral history project Café Deutschland, conducting interviews with key figures of the postwar German art scene. Anna currently teaches at the Department of African Art at FU Berlin and has received doctoral funding from the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.
Elsa M’Bala is a musician and vocalist. For the last couple of years, she has been interested in African archives. In her show, she presents an archive of African cassettes: over 4000 pieces collected during a period of 35 years by Ass Niang in Dakar, Senegal. By using technology as an empowering tool and through her own keen observations, she explores further the interconnections between race, gender, technology and spirituality. For the past 15 years M`bala has been a musician, exploring the mixing of acoustic and electronic instruments worldwide. Since 2020 M`bala has been focusing on local institutions as a means to increase the visibility of their personal archives. During the last 5 years M`bala has been successfully working with various museums across Europe and Africa, including the Humboldt Forum and the Musee ethnologique de Geneve.
Dior Thiam is a multidisciplinary artist. Throughout broadly different mediums, she explores untold histories, exoticism and the specific historical knowledge held by social and individual bodies. Drawing inspiration from historical events and occurrences, from poetry, prose and personal experiences, her work raises questions around the localities of knowledge as well as memory and remembrance. Through a process-based approach of layering, interweaving, fragmenting, collecting and reassembling, she extracts and re/arranges seemingly disparate pieces of research. After studying philosophy and social sciences at Humboldt University Berlin, she enrolled at Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts in 2015. From 2019-2020 she was a guest student at the Institute for Art in Context at the University of Fine Arts Berlin, where she graduated in the class of Jimmy Robert in 2024. Among others, her work has been showcased in a number of international exhibitions and publications, including at the Dakar Biennale, the African Biennale of Photography; Bamako Encounters, Goodman Gallery Johannesburg, Atlanta Museum of African Diaspora, Kunstraum Kreuzberg as well as collaborations with Savvy Contemporary, Archive Sites and Haus der Kulturen der Welt. She won the BBA Artist Prize 2023, the Schulz-Stübner-Prize for Painting 2024 and the ECOWAS Artist Prize for Integration 2024.
