On Saturday, November 7, at 6 pm, CRAC Alsace and Delphi Space (Freiburg im Breisgau) are delighted to invite you to the opening of African Brainrot, a solo exhibition by Assya Agbere. This off-site exhibition marks the conclusion of the artist’s research and production residency at CRAC Alsace in 2026.

African Brainrot will be on display from November 9 to 14, 2026, at Delphi Space, an independent art space located in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, at Brombergstr. 17c. Admission is free and open to everyone.

***

Borrowed from the lexicon of internet culture, brainrot refers to the effects of excessive and uncritical consumption of online content. During a year-long research residency at CRAC Alsace, Assya Agbere appropriates this term to trace the representations of black cultures circulating on the internet. African Brainrot brings together a process of collecting and categorising images gleaned from social media. By recreating a “mini-internet”, the artist exposes a web shaped by colonial legacies: a constantly expanding universe in which she attempts to orient herself.

In her master’s thesis, Afro Core (2024–2025)*, Assya Agbere examines the effects of cyber-globalisation: the worldwide export of an internet conceived through a Western lens. Far from being neutral or universal, this internet is structured by inequalities of access and representation, with the African continent particularly marginalised. In response to these dominant codes, the artist archives viral videos, memes and AI-generated images found on TikTok and Instagram, featuring African diasporas and the imaginaries associated with them. Through this activist gesture, she preserves a record of the images that shape perceptions of Africa and the stereotypes they perpetuate.

On the window of Delphi Space, printed screenshots disrupt the familiar rhythm of scrolling. At the centre of the space, television screens are attached to a scaffold, as though Assya Agbere were building a new reality on a yet unexplored planet. Seven screens each broadcast a selection of videos associated with an archetype**: the Innocent, often represented by children; the Rebel, bringing together figures associated with crime or resistance; the Creator, embodied by those who work to invent new identities for Africa; the Heroine, expression of courage and power; the Lover, evoking imaginaries of love within African communities; and the Sage, offering a vision of a more peaceful world. A seventh entity emerges intermittently: the Jester, an archetype in which black people are reduced to figures of ridicule, expected to entertain their audience.

Enlarged and amplified, these images originally intended to scroll across our smartphones are extracted from the digital stream and transformed into sculptural matter, experienced physically as we move around them.

These figures unfold through the three acts of a single drama. Aesthetic, Martyr and Redemption stage superficial projections onto the appearance of black people, the violence inflicted upon their bodies and ultimately a paradox: in order to be accepted by society, must one erase one's identity to the point of abandoning oneself, or assert one's presence by playing with the codes?

This existential question runs through the film The Black Cyborg. Projected onto the wall, it appears as a hybrid being, a mixed-race entity striving to carve out a place for itself in the history of the future. As it wanders, it reveals its navigational tools: the instruments of archiving—identifying, downloading, naming, categorizing and creating subcategories. Nearby, a mental and cosmic map unfolds the ramifications of this journey, suspended between the desire to master a territory and the impossibility of grasping its boundaries.

Assya Agbere thus traverses a collective visual unconscious, filed with stereotypes and omissions. But how does one find one's way in a universe that never stops expanding? African Brainrot maps out the fragile terrain of a quest: the search for a planet where images can be reclaimed, one's own history written, and a sense of belonging invented amid the disorientation of the web.

Curator: Maria Claudia Gamboa

* Afro Core. Xploring the (non)Geographies of Cyberspace, Haute école des arts du Rhin, 2024–2025.

** The artist draws on the archetypes developed by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), understood as universal patterns of psychic behaviour emerging from the collective unconscious.