The exhibition, titled “Nok. Origin of African Sculpture”, will be on show from 30 October 2013 to 23 February 2014, and will be presented under the patronage of Dr. Norbert Lammert, President of the German Federal Diet.
“Over 100 sculptures and fragments recovered by the archaeologists of Frankfurt’s Goethe University will be displayed in a dialogue with contemporary works from Ancient Egypt and Greek-Roman Antiquity from the collections of the Liebieghaus,” according to a statement by the organisers.
“This pointed confrontation thematizes the major conflict about the radically changed understanding of art in the twentieth century by spanning from Europe’s figurative art on the one hand to the free forms of so-called primitive art on the other,” it added.
The Nok terracotta figures rank among the earliest examples of African sculpture and were discovered in more than 200 excavation sites in Nigeria within the past eight years. The elaborately restored reddish figures are confronted with about sixty artworks from Egypt in Late Antiquity and Classical Greece that date from the same period.
“While the exchange between these cultures was blocked by the Sahara two thousand years ago, the show at the Liebieghaus offers the opportunity to compare the entirely independently created Nok sculptures with the art of contemporary cultures around the Mediterranean,” the statement said.
The Liebieghaus exhibition also highlights the research results of this extraordinarily successful long-term excavation project and, besides the sculptures, comprises everyday objects such as earthenware vessels, stone tools, and jewellery, thus conveying a comprehensive picture of this remarkable West African archaeological culture.
Shaped from coarse-grained clay, the sculptures were covered with slip which has only survived in a few instances. Human beings are the main subject; occasionally we also come upon animals — especially snakes and lizards — as well as chimeras, i.e. beings half animal and half human. Some objects provide us with unusual information on the Nok culture: one relief, for example, shows a man beating the drum on which he sits. This item presented in the exhibition is the oldest testimony of music in Sub-Saharan Africa. The non-literate culture, which originated around 1500 BC, flourished, and vanished around the year 0, remains an enigma in spite of new insights. Suppositions concerning the function and context of the excavated terracotta figures necessarily remain hypothetical. The Frankfurt team’s research shows that the sculptures were probably used for a variety of purposes, some of which were associated with ritual contexts such as ancestral worship and healing practices. All figures were broken when found. We know of only a single complete figure excavated to date.
The research results from the excavations carried out by a team of archaeologists from Frankfurt’s Goethe University around Prof. Dr. Peter Breunig in Nigeria since 2005 are comprehensively presented. The research and exhibition also received additional support from the Julius Berger International.
A comprehensive catalogue of the findings will be published by Africa Magna Verlag to accompany the exhibition. Edited by Peter Breunig, Head of the Department “Archaeology and Archaeobotany of Africa” at Frankfurt’s Goethe University, the catalogue comprises contributions by Christina Beck, Peter Breunig, Vinzenz Brinkmann, Manfred K. H. Eggert, Angela Fagg Rackham, Gabriele Franke, Birgit Frohreich, Musa Oluwaseyi Hambolu, Alexa Höhn, Joseph F. Jemkur, Tanja M. Männel, Jasmin Munir, Klaus-Peter Nagel, Katharina Neumann, Umaru Yusuf Potiskum, Stephan Ritter, Nicole Rupp, and Andreas Zimmermann.
A press preview on the exhibition will hold on Tuesday, 29 October 2013. The presentation in the Liebieghaus will be accompanied by a lecture on Thursday, 5 December 2013 under the title “On the Artists’ Trail. Archaeological investigations into Nigeria’s Nok culture.”
