El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics offers the first art-historical survey on the multidimensional work of Senegalese artist, curator, and cultural activist El Hadji Sy. Spanning thirty years of his practice as a painter, performance artist, and founder of numerous artists’ collectives and workshops in Dakar (Laboratoire AGIT’ART, Tenq, and Village des Arts), it provides unprecedented insight into the conceptual and aesthetic framework of a major living artist and curator from West Africa.

With newly commissioned essays and interviews by Hans Belting, Clémentine Deliss, Mamadou Diouf, Julia Grosse, Yvette Mutumba, Philippe Pirotte, and Manon Schwich, the book is presented in a bilingual English-German edition and also contains unique archival material, including manifestos, documents, and over four hundred illustrations.

Founded in 1904, Frankfurt’s Weltkulturen Museum houses a remarkable collection of ethnographic artifacts from Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, with the aims of advancing public education and fostering innovative anthropological research across a wide variety of contemporary artistic practices.

Developed through artistic research in the Weltkulturen Museum’s Weltkulturen Labor research lab, Foreign Exchange raises questions about the relationship between the museum’s educational and scientific aims and global trade. Together, essays by anthropologists, art historians, artists, and curators form an extended conversation around the historical accumulation and commodification of artifacts and, in particular, the representation of the human body in ethnographic photographs. Rounding out the volume are many previously unpublished photographs of works discussed. Contributing authors and artist include Peggy Buth, Minerva Cuevas, Gabriel Gbadamosi, David Lau, Tom McCarthy, David Weber-Krebs, and Luke Willis-Thompson.