Passage III

To Repel Ghosts

Passage III: To Repel Ghosts accompanies Cauleen Smith’s exhibition The Volcano Manifesto, extending its core ideas: speculative concepts of community and society, extractivism, politics of memory, and the formation of identities within the Black diaspora, as well as the question of how images and narratives produce and perpetuate histories of violence and liberation. Located in the Passage space—an archive and mediation room established in 2025 in collaboration with architect Assaf Kimmel—the project brings together the exhibition’s public program, the kestnerkids activities, and a newly configured archival display, opening up new perspectives on both The Volcano Manifesto and the exhibition history of the institution. Conceived by Kimmel as an open framework for knowledge and memory, the space weaves together research, mediation, institutional memory, and public reflection and is reactivated with each iteration.

The title of this third iteration, To Repel Ghosts, refers to Jean-Michel Basquiat. Appearing in several of his paintings from the 1980s, the self-reflexive phrase functions as a response to forces such as colonial violence, racialized projections, and the expectations of the art world. Basquiat’s painting To Repel Ghosts (1986) was shown in his 1987 solo exhibition at the Kestner Gesellschaft and inscribed itself into the institution’s memory through posters, the exhibition catalogue, and the recollections of visitors. This gesture of refusal and self-assertion resonates with the concerns and contemporary strategies of resistance at the heart of Cauleen Smith’s practice. Against this backdrop, the exhibition Kilengi. African Art from the Bareiss Collection (1997) also comes into view, its colonial framing and mechanisms of appropriation subjected to critical scrutiny.

The archival presentation focuses on the exhibition projects Jean-Michel Basquiat (1986), Jean-Michel Basquiat: Drawings (1989), True North and Fantôme Afrique by Isaac Julien (2006), The Blue Rider Extended Remix by Chris Ofili (2006), behind the eye is the promise of rain by Helen Cammock (2022), everything I have ever touched by Diedrick Brackens (2023), and BloodLetter by Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju (2024). Together, these positions bring into relation urban iconography, cinematic image-worlds, textiles as carriers of memory, and voice and body as archives of social experience. Blackness appears in these works as a remembering, resistant presence that unfolds through traces, recurrence, and embodied experience. Through the exhibition’s public program, connections emerge between themes that run across all of these projects—and, in particular, across Cauleen Smith’s The Volcano Manifesto: the Black diaspora, the lived history of bodies, and questions of extractivism and collective memory.