Berlin’s Unseen Memory: James Gregory Atkinson’s Ebenholz Exhibition

November 20, 20253 min read

A new door opens onto Berlin’s multilayered historical fabric.

James Gregory Atkinson deepens his research-based practice – focused on post-World War II Black German history – in the exhibition Ebenholz at Galerie Thomas Schulte’s Potsdamer Strasse space.

Atkinson’s work invites us to look at traces left in the margins of official history, quietly resting in scattered archives. Sounds, documents, objects… All of them offer a material counterpart to the existence of a community that has been forgotten or deliberately rendered invisible.

Memories Rescued from Shadowy Desk Trays

Ebenholz is the latest chapter in the artist’s long-running excavation of history.

Atkinson turns to footnotes, personal archives, and fragmented narratives to reconstruct the stories of Afro-German communities that grew up in post-war Germany.

Emerging from this process are elements such as:

Found audio recordings
Military documents
Everyday objects
Visual fragments

These lend the exhibition space both historical weight and individual sensitivity.

Atkinson’s method goes far beyond conventional historical reading – it is a practice of listening to the silent zones of the archive.

Ebenholz: A Material, a Metaphor

The exhibition’s title, Ebenholz (ebony), carries cultural associations with Blackness while simultaneously pointing to Germany’s colonial past, body politics, and crises of representation.

Atkinson makes these burdens visible and, at the same time, transforms them.

A New Step in Berlin’s Tradition of Confronting History

Located in Galerie Thomas Schulte’s second space on Potsdamer Strasse, the exhibition is a powerful contribution to Berlin’s critical culture of remembrance. While bringing the city’s post-war identity debates back into focus, it sharpens the question: “Who is remembered, who is forgotten?”

Atkinson grants concrete presence to these stories that have slipped through the cracks of Germany’s official memory – a kind of act of reclamation.

Apartman No:26 Note

Ebenholz is more than historical research; it is a counter-archive opened against collective amnesia.

Within Berlin’s constantly shifting cultural fabric, this exhibition – drawing from both politics and personal memory – is a candidate to become one of the most important acts of narrative construction in 2025.