The arc of German artist Dierk Schmidt’s career has been tied, from the beginning, to social, political and institutional critique. Schmidt draws on visual devices to question linear conceptions of history, with a specific focus on colonial accounts, which shape the nucleus of his concerns. In the installation Die Teilung der Erde, Schmidt alludes to a key episode in history in terms of narrating colonialism: the Berlin Africa Conference of 1884–1885, during which European and US powers prepared the division of the entire continent. Such an appropriation took the form of an international legal act, a process whereby the African societies that existed prior to colonisation were directly excluded.

Schmidt’s project is based on wide-ranging research leading to the consideration of representing, graphically, the brutality with which the colonial borders to African societies were driven forward. Therefore, he draws up the visual translation of legal abstractions stemming from the Berlin Conference and its “legal” justification of violence against Africa. Schmidt forms his project with explanatory panels as a kind of archive that takes the form of an exhibition device, while different cartographic and statistical resources materialise in symbols depicting the real, political and economic consequences of imperialist legal strategies on colonised territories and peoples.

The artist, moreover, places the stress on his country’s responsibility for the genocide of the Herero and Namaqua ethnic groups in Namibia, a territory subjected to German colonial control. In a historical journey to the present and in reference to the need for the reparation and re-writing of history, the installation is completed with a portrait of the German Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, who apologised for this occurrence in the name of the German Government and citizens.