Lothar Baumgarten

Lothar Baumgarten (1944-2018) was the son of an ethnographer. He learned a great deal about comparative cultural studies at a young age and became fascinated by the organisational principles underlying the perception and analysis of cultural differences. His interest in other cultures and realities far removed from his own came naturally to him.

Baumgarten made installations, photos, films, audio works and wall drawings that interweave reality and imagination, often in a way that addresses how the West looks at ‘the Other’. His early work stemmed from a critical examination of 18th-century German anthropology, in which researchers reported on non-Western places and cultures they had never experienced first-hand, basing their writings entirely on the authority of archives and books in Western libraries. Baumgarten revealed the absurdity of this scholarly method.

He later drew his own knowledge and inspiration from travel and from extended periods spent among Indigenous peoples in North and South America. His stay among the Yanomami in the Amazon region on the border between Venezuela and Brazil, which lasted from 1977 to 1980, is legendary. It yielded films, audio recordings, murals and photographic series.

Baumgarten’s travels formed the basis for an oeuvre that centres on ethnography and local histories. The extensive project Carbon, for instance, is an artistic reflection on the expansion of the railway network in the United States. He photographed train tracks and landscapes as a way to document how European immigrants increased and flourished at the expense of Indigenous peoples. Through his distinctive methods, Baumgarten rendered visible the pain of colonialism and the complex encounters between civilisations.