Coumba Samba’s exhibition deutschland for the Kunstverein in Hamburg negotiates the intricate relationship between structure, form, and colour as constituents of coded systems of global infrastructure. Monochromatic geometric forms, stacked throughout the gallery, evoke the visual language of international supply chains, while directional strobe lights that lend the space a sense of rhythm, mark pathways on the floor. The large container-like structures sculptures rest at different degrees of ease. Their rigid geometries recall the compositions of early 20th-century abstract geometric paintings. Samba’s installation, however, diverges from this art-historical precedent by lending the monochromes a sense of coded meaning and cultural resonance, transforming deutschland into an opaque system whose logic remains elusive, like a glitching interface that never fully resolves. deutschland builds on Samba’s exhibition Red Gas (2024) at Arcadia Missa, London, in which painted radiators become the endpoint and signifier of the Russian gas industry’s entanglement with the African and European continents. At the Kunstverein, the structures evoke a similar tension between the static and material residue amidst globalisation’s sleepless flow. As ubiquitous symbols of global trade–now central to debates around U.S. tariff wars—they also interrogate the uneasy relationship between free trade agreements and sovereignty, which international supply chains willingly or unwillingly transform. In this context, the colours, chosen to resonate with both cultural and emotional connotations, become a language through which Samba dissects a world dominated by networks of capital. The strobing lights echo the architecture of the stateless hub—guiding the flow of goods, data, and people. Viewers navigating the exhibition become participants in this ecology, moving through the space as though traversing a port or a terminal at night—zones that are both material and conceptual, and where the logic of borders is increasingly porous. This interplay—between the mechanical and the affective, between a sense of direction and being without coordinates – reveals how infrastructure, often unseen, comes to reflect and define human experience within vast, impersonal frameworks. As this matrix of endpoints, remote nodes and opaque ideology strains under its own logic and latently begins to warp, geometries of power and place scramble. Where deutschland began as a metaphor for a sense of locale within a larger network of flows, it becomes a disorientingly intimate experience of globalisation’s distorting abstraction, as a system of navigation adrift, eroding the sense of geography that conjured it.
deutschland is curated by Milan Ther and accompanied by a film programme organized by Coumba Samba to depict the historic representation of global power relations in mainstream visual culture.
