As the generation of East German Millennials, those born into or raised during the upheaval of the post-reunification era, comes of age, a growing engagement with the collective (post-)GDR past is taking shape.

But what does it mean to be born into such a fragile system as the child of a white mother and a Black father? A system marked by unemployment, uncertainty, and a rise in right-wing extremism? Verdiana Albano explores these layered questions through the lens of her own biography. Drawing on her parents’ Stasi files as well as both personal and institutional visual archives, she investigates her own fragmented and secret-laden Afro-European history.

In her pursuit of a multi-ethnic identity, Albano navigates the space between staging and documentation, tracing issues such as postcolonialism through an intersectional perspective and her position as an Artist of Colour in a society undergoing transformation.

Franziska Kunze

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Verdiana Albano, born in 1993 in Meerane. Studied at the University of Art and Design Offenbach (HfG) until 2021, including a semester at the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts in Chongqing, China, in 2019. Her work explores socio-economic narratives and personal connections between documentation and staging images. She has received the HfG Photo Award of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, the SK Neustart Kultur grant, and was an Allianz Foundation Fellow. Albano lives and works in Berlin and Frankfurt.