Joana Tischkau

Together with Anta Helena Recke, Elisabeth Hampe and Frieder Blume, Joana Tischkau created and opened the first German Museum for Black Music and Entertainment in 2020 in Frankfurt and Berlin. It houses a comprehensive archive of records, magazines, autographs and memorabilia, which are exhibited in vibrant space, open for discussion and bittersweet nostalgia. Their performative gesture adopts the cultural technique of the museum and is an attempt to artistically disrupt the practice of archiving and perseverance of cultural goods.
Black history in Germany, from the Hagenbeck’s Völkerschauen to the American occupation, is brought together in a semi-fictitious narrative of a unifying black cultural history. In their juxtaposition, artists such as Milli Vanilli, Roberto Blanco, Boney M, Captain Jack, and Günther Kaufmann gain new visibility and reveal similarities and differences in their staging, strategies and attributions that burst the form that white Germany has imagined them for.

Joana Tischkau is an artist working at the intersection of dance, theater performance and curation. Her artistic practice is a hybrid mash-up where the the writings of bell hooks meet beatboxing, whiteness is turned into a workout, youtube tutorials become her only source material and Roberto Blanco is hailed as an Afro-German Hero, subversively distorting cultural practices, codes and meaning inscribed onto bodies of Colour within the context of western art and dance history. She has performed her works at the Tanzplattform Deutschland 2020, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Danshallerne Copenhagen and Hebbel am Ufer Theater Berlin. Joana lives and works in Frankfurt/Main and Berlin. Foto © Soumé

CURRICULUM is the public school of performance art: a lecture program curated by Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt in collaboration with Theatre- and Performance Studies at the University of Copenhagen. CURRICULUM is supported by Bikubenfonden and the Danish Arts Council. This special edition of CURRICULUM is generously hosted by Toaster.