Stéphane Kabila

Gerda Henkel Fellowship

Since mid-2023, the curator and scholar Stéphane Kabila from the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been conducting research at MARKK and dealing with the holdings collected by the German Africanist Leo Frobenius on a research trip to the east of the Congo region, which was then privately owned by the Belgian King Leopold, supported by the Ethnographic Museum at the time. He is concerned with their provenance and with questions of cultural alienation, resonance and re-appropriation, also from the perspective of contemporary art. His research is made possible by the Gerda Henkel Foundation’s “4 Museums – 4 Opportunities” program, which provides renewable two-year fellowships at four German ethnological museums.