MUNICH.- "Sa w wè a se pa sa" (There’s more to it than meets the eye. Haitian saying)

Can an exhibition by a German photographer convey an image of Haiti that is not charac­terized by stereotypes? With "Out of Focus", U5 present the images of Leonore Mau (1916 –2013) in a multimedia, sensory environment.

Leonore Mau traveled to Haiti in the 1970s during the dictatorship of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. She traveled together with the writer Hubert Fichte (1935 –1986). The trip was part of a long-term research project on Afro-diasporic religions. Mau’s photographs were published in the photo books "Xango" (1976) and "Petersilie" (1980) and in travel reports in many German magazines. However, the majority of her photographs have not yet been published or shown in exhibitions and are in the photographer’s estate at the bpk-Fotoarchiv, Berlin.

In Mau’s photo books, there are photographs that confirm the prejudiced image of Haiti and Vodou, but in her extensive legacy there are many more images in which everyday life, community, dictatorship, spirituality and tourism coexist. Leonore Mau’s oeuvre opens a space for critical reflection on political, economic, cultural, and personal entanglements. This touches upon questions of aesthetics, as well as on the ethics of photography. How can the images be shown without reproducing power relations?

"What you see is not what it is": the environment developed by the artist’s collective U5 in collaboration with ALIAS architects addresses questions of showing and not showing. Madafi Pierre, an artist and filmmaker, designed a sound collage to accompany it.

Together with the cultural anthropologist and artist Gina Athena Ulysse, the houngan (priest), musician and general director of the Bureau National d’Ethnologie in Port-au-Prince Erol Josué and other people and their different expertise, the exhibition develops an approach to Leonore Mau’s images that allows for ambivalence, in which criticism and beauty are not contradictory.

The exhibition is an artistic development of the research project "Out of Focus" by Dora Imhof and U5 at the University of Zurich.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive four-language publication edited by Dora Imhof, Gina Athena Ulysse, and U5, published by Hatje Cantz.