Traces – an exploration of Chemnitz

Emeka Ogboh

May 9 – August 28, 2025

“Traces” encapsulates the lingering marks of Chemnitz’s industrial heart and visionary soul - a city historically shaped by dense neighborhoods, bustling factories, and ambitious innovation in textiles. This contemporary exhibition journeys into Chemnitz’s layered past through an immersive, multi-sensory exploration of the traces left by industrialization.

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In his exploration, Emeka Ogboh unfolds a dense, multisensory topography of Chemnitz’s industrial past – a city whose urban and social geography was fundamentally shaped by the textile industry of the 19th century. In a complex choreography of sculpture, spatial installation, sound, scent, and culinary art, Ogboh reconstructs the atmospheric strata of an era that celebrated technological progress while simultaneously generating profound social, ecological, and existential tensions.

At the center of the exhibition stands a monumental sculpture that transforms the spinning wheel – an emblem of early industrialization – into an anthropomorphic form: twelve human arms, both strong and delicate, replace the spokes of the wheel. This symbolic arrangement reflects the gender-specific division of labor in Chemnitz‘s textile factories around 1880, when women made up about one-third of the workforce. Ogboh’s work thus evokes Marx’s theory of alienation: the loss of human subjectivity within the mechanized production process.

This theme gains a particular historical resonance in Chemnitz: in 1953, the city was renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt, and an oversized bust of the thinker was erected in the city center – an ideologically charged act that explicitly linked the urban identity to the socialist utopias Marx envisioned in his critique of capitalism. The fragments from Das Kapital cited in the exhibition thus refer not only to the industrial working world of the 19th century but also to the symbolic overwriting of Chemnitz’s identity in the 20th century.

The exhibition space itself is transformed into an immersive, almost sacred darkness by deep black walls – a reference to the historical phenomenon of the „black snow“ of 1865, when Chemnitz lay beneath a dense shroud of smoke and soot. This somber atmosphere was so defining that Chemnitz earned the nickname „Ruß-Chams“ („Sooty Chams“) in the neighboring Erzgebirge region – a place often perceived only as a shadowy silhouette beneath a sooty bell at the horizon.

Amid this darkness, the city’s early motto „Live closely, think broadly“ („Eng wohnen, weit denken“) appears in neon, fragmenting the homogeneous blackness. This visual density is further enriched by the olfactory installation Industrial Essence: the smells of steam, machine oil, and cotton unfold into a sensory field of memory that evokes the corporeal experience of industrial labor. Soundscapes composed of mechanical rhythms and a culinary intervention that reinterprets historical workers‘ meals expand the sensory accessibility of history.

Traces is not a conventional historical reconstruction but rather a poetically condensed, bodily meditation on industrialization, urbanity, and memory. Emeka Ogboh succeeds in translating the multilayered past of Chemnitz – between industrial modernity, Marxist ideology, and post-industrial transformation – into a living, fragile fabric of remembrance.