Every Artist Must Take Sides – Resonances of Eslanda and Paul Robeson
Participatory exhibition tour
12/4/2025, 5 PM

Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson (1895–1965) and Paul Robeson (1898–1976) were two exceptional figures of the 20th century. Their political and artistic work was an expression of a way of thinking that understood the world in relation, and of uncompromising resistance to all forms of oppression. The exhibition and festival project “Every Artist Must Take Sides – Resonances of Eslanda and Paul Robeson” by the Akademie der Künste is dedicated to their lived practice and its relevance for today. In dialogue with materials from the Paul Robeson Archive, twelve artistic positions–in sound and spatial installations, video works, sculptures, collages and photographs–negotiate questions of solidarity, collective freedom and mutual responsibility.

Artists: James Gregory Atkinson, Leila Bencharnia, Sonya Clark, Andrii Dostliev & Lia Dostlieva, Ângela Ferreira, Masimba Hwati, patricia kaersenhout, Ariel Orah, Kirsten Reese, Matana Roberts, Dread Scott and Katharina Warda

Jeanne-Ange Wagne is a creative art historian, knowledge mediator and interpreter who conducts artistic research into memory, colonial provenance research and trend cycles in art, culture and fashion. She regularly moderates, conceptualizes and publishes critical mediation formats, artistic interventions, lectures and short texts for cultural and art institutions most recently for Biennale für Freiburg 3, Kestner Gesellschaft, c/o Berlin, Creamcake Berlin, Goethe Institut Kamerun x Musée National Yaoundé, SAVVY Contemporary amongst others.

Previously she also worked for the German branch of the transnational research project “The Restitution of Knowledge”, at the department of Art History headed by the art historian Prof Dr Bénédicte Savoy at Technische Universität Berlin, where in 2022 and 2023 she co-curated and coordinated the event series “KuK-Tuesdays: Dislocation”.

"In the summer of 2022, my colleague Fogha Mc and I explored the question of how artworks and objects could complement or even replace traditional archives as carriers of information and repositories of memory in the future as part of the 12th Berlin Biennale. 

The thought experiment, which we initiated in the exhibition rooms of the Akademie der Künste Pariser Platz, is now continuing at the Hanseatenweg location as part of the exhibition Every Artist Must Take Sides. The participatory tour starts at the on-site archive stations, which provide selected insights into the life and work of Eslanda and Paul Robeson. From this, we can derive and illustrate worlds of ideas and concepts and show how Paul Robeson used music as a means of political activism. We want to explore, define, and update these worlds of ideas and concepts through a connecting dialogue with the contemporary artistic positions of the exhibition."