Visiting the Brandenburg Museum

In July 2025, numerous members of the Potsdam Postcolonial Studies Collective came together to visit Potsdam's Brandenburg Museum. The museum invites visitors to view the state of Brandenburg from new perspectives; it aims to highlight how local culture and global developments intertwine. The current exhibition “Signals of Power. Nauen, Kamina, Windhoek” examines colonial communication networks. Curator Dr. Katalin Krasznahorkai was kind enough to offer us an exclusive tour in English.

The exhibition illuminates a previously underexplored aspect of the history of wireless telegraphy. The high-power wireless stations in Nauen (Brandenburg), Kamina (Togo), and Windhoek (Namibia) formed a colonially shaped communication triangle of the German Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. The station in Nauen is the only one that still exists.

In the exhibition, each of the three places, Nauen, Kamina and Windhoek, become a stage for artistic expression and curatorial reflection. Namibian artist Tuli Mekondjo, alongside Togolese filmmaker Madjé Ayité, and German artists Frederieke Moormann and Angelika Waniek, open new perspectives in confronting this colonial heritage.