Part of the ongoing exhibition “3 Lieder für Marie Nejar”

The German Film Office and Goethe-Institut New York are pleased to present a screening of Robert A. Stemmle's 1952 film Toxi in conjunction with the ongoing exhibition 3 Lieder für Marie Nejar by artist James Gregory Atkinson. Atkinson will be joined by Yale University Assistant Professor of History of Art and Black Studies Nana Adusei-Poku to discuss the film.

After World War II, the well-off Rose family of Munich finds a five-year-old girl, Toxi, abandoned at their doorstep. The mixed-race daughter of an American G.I. and a now deceased German mother, Toxi's arrival inspires both empathy and suspicion in the Roses. It’s only once she finds her place in the family that her father returns, expecting to bring Toxi back to America with him.

One of the first German films to explore the experiences of Black children born during the occupation, Toxi features a title song by Marie Nejar, the Afro-German singer and actress to whom the exhibition is dedicated. For Atkinson, Toxi operates as a reoccurring cultural touchstone that contextualizes and lays bare the questions at stake in his own practice and biography.

3 Lieder für Marie Nejar is on view through March 19 at Goethe-Institut New York and is made possible with the generous support of Hessische Kulturstiftung and the Friends of Goethe New York.

Toxi
Dir. Robert A. Stemmle
West Germany, 1952
88 min.
With Elfie Fiegert, Paul Bildt, Johanna Hofer


James Gregory Atkinson
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.

Nana Adusei-Poku
Nana Adusei-Poku is an Assistant Professor in the History or Art and Black Studies Department at Yale University. She was prior Assistant Professor in African Diasporic Art History in the Department of History of Art at the University of California Berkeley. She was previously Associate Professor and Luma Foundation Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2019-2022), and Visiting Professor in Art History of the African Diaspora at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City (2018-2019). The question “What are the conditions of our existence,” which Stuart Hall asked, remains core to her journey and inspires her to embody and develop an engaged pedagogical approach and to explore the performativity of nothingness and life “in the hold.” Her research on Cultural Shifts and how they articulate themselves through the intersections of Art, Politics, and Popular Culture; Artistic productions from the Black Diasporas, and curatorial practice as a research tool to shape art historical discourses.