James Gregory Atkinson: Artist Talk

In his research-based exhibition projects, artist James Gregory Atkinson combines social and political history with autobiographical perspectives to examine the absence of Afro-German experiences within established narratives of race, identity, and nationality in Germany. By integrating documents, objects, oral histories, bodies, places, and performative practices into a living, shared archive, he reimagines memory, experience, and knowledge as relational and dynamic, with each element functioning as a historical carrier. Situated within a lineage of post-conceptual artists, Atkinson approaches the archive as a site of self-determination and a locus for critiquing power, engaging communities and significant sites through participatory methods that bring historical and contemporary experiences into dialogue, reflecting their coexisting and interwoven temporalities.