An exhibition by Marcelo Brodsky and Forensic Architecture.
Curated by Prof. Dr. Márcio Seligmann-Silva.
Between 1904 and 1908, the German colonial army waged a war of extermination against the Ovaherero and Nama peoples in what was then German South West Africa. Thousands of survivors were deported to concentration camps, where forced labour, starvation, disease, and systematic violence claimed thousands more lives. Shark Island, off the coast of Lüderitz, became a death camp—the first of the twentieth century. Even in death, the prisoners were denied a dignified burial; their remains were transported to Germany for racist and anthropological research—a practice later pursued by the Nazis on an industrial scale.
More than a century later, Shark Island remains a contested site of memory and is now threatened by large-scale infrastructure projects for “green hydrogen.” What may seem like a distant colonial past thus becomes a question of the present: What happens when the ground itself becomes an archive?
At the centre of the exhibition is Marcelo Brodsky’s series Traces of Violence (2021). It consists of thirty photographs taken by soldiers, missionaries, and colonial officials during German colonial rule in Namibia. Brodsky overlays these images with colour and inscriptions. In doing so, the photographs become witnesses against the violence they were originally intended to conceal or glorify.
Alongside this series, Brodsky presents the work Shark Island (2024), created in response to investigations by Forensic Architecture and Forensis, whose film of the same title is also included in the exhibition. The film Shark Island (2024) reconstructs the history and geography of the concentration camp and was produced in collaboration with the Ovaherero Traditional Authority (OTA) and the Nama Traditional Leaders Association (NTLA).
