Artist Talk: Decolonial Perspectives on Textiles

With Percy Nii Nortey (artist) and Suy Lan Hopmann (program curator, Siftung Stadtmuseum Berlin), moderation: Ximena G. Toro (assistant curator outreach, Brücke Museum)

How can textiles challenge colonial hierarchies of value? In this talk, the artist Percy Nii Nortey and the curator Suy Lan Hopmann, reflect on textiles as both artistic medium and site of labour, memory, and embodied knowledge. In Nortey’s practice, fabric carries the traces of daily work. By collaborating with workers in Ghana, he transforms stained cloth into a material archive of proletarian labour. The discussion focuses on the Break from Reality exhibition at the Nikolaikirche in Berlin, which was produced as part of the 2024 Dekoloniale Artist Residency, organised by Dekoloniale and Stadtmuseum Berlin. It also considers the artist’s broader artistic practice, exploring its engagement with labour, visibility and value. It considers how recognition is shaped and whose labour remains unseen.

Percy Nii Nortey is a multidisciplinary artist born and based in Kumasi, Ghana. His practice explores themes of identity, materiality, decolonization, memory, and labor, blurring the boundaries between installation, performative objects, and moving sculptures. Deeply rooted in his personal history and the socio-economic conditions of Ghana, Nortey’s work aims to decolonize minds, empower Black communities, and reclaim agency over their narratives. 

Suy Lan Hopmann is a program curator at the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin. She works on the topics of colonialism and coloniality, racism and migration as well as gender and queer. Previously, she has been responsible for Hamburg’s decolonization strategies at the city’s Department of Media and Culture. As curator for special projects and diversity at the Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt (MARKK), she curated the exhibition “Hey Hamburg, do you know Duala Manga Bell?” on German-Cameroonian colonial history.

Ximena Gutiérrez Toro is an artist and assistant curator in the Outreach Department of the Brücke-Museum in Berlin.

This event will be held in English. We are committed to respectful interaction. Discriminatory behavior has no place at our events.

Participation in public events is included with museum admission. No advance registration is required.