ONDER_DRUK - Bitterzoet Erfgoed - GRID Grafisch Museum Groningen

WHERE: Groningen, NL

WHEN: May 2022

WHAT: residency at GRID during the months of March, April,and May

PROJECT: “The technique of printing – which allows for the wide dissemination of texts and images – has made a painful contribution in recent centuries to creating stereotypes and perpetuating racist ideas. In the exhibition you can see, for example, clichés (metal printing forms) of the Zwarte Piet figure as we know them from Sinterklaas books, toy advertisements and coloring books, with frizzy hair, earrings and thick lips. Completely confrontational are the posters of soap commercials, in which black people were washed ‘clean’ and white when they used a certain soap. Most printers behind the presses probably didn’t think twice about reproducing such images and texts. The other side of the story is: the same pressure technique can also be used to counteract, by means of pamphlets, for example, and very different posters. In the 1970s, the poster with the text ‘Don’t press South African!’, against the Outspan congress, made a big impression. Certainly also because of the image, which was quite ‘literal’. Such confrontational, activist expressions have returned to the streets and in the media in recent years.”
(GRID, 2022)

WHO: Phillip Odongo Ekwaro-Osire (People of Earth) / Bitterzoet Erfgoed / GRID