The exhibition “6 August 1870” at the Haus der Graphischen Sammlung in Freiburg presents a seventy-part photographic and text-based series by Dutch artist Marcel van Eeden. In this extensive cycle, he investigates how nationalism, colonialism, and racism have been intertwined from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 through to the present day. The starting point of his artistic research is the life and afterlife of Abdel Kader Ben Lahcen, a colonial soldier from the Maghreb who died in 1870 in a German military hospital during the war. His story did not end with his death: his human remains were transferred into an anatomical collection in Freiburg, where they were kept for scientific study and never buried or returned to his homeland.

Using his own black-and-white photographs and quotations from historical documents, van Eeden reconstructs and interprets this real historical case as a lens through which to address wider questions of colonial violence, racialized science, and the ethics of collecting and preserving human remains. His visual research leads him from battlefields in Alsace and Baden to contemporary sites in Tunisia and Algeria, tracing both the soldier’s biography and the long institutional afterlife of his remains. In the exhibition, the sequence of images and texts unfolds like a visual essay, inviting visitors to reflect on how seemingly local histories in Freiburg are deeply entangled with imperial warfare and colonial structures.

The project is presented by the Museum für Neue Kunst in the Haus der Graphischen Sammlung and is developed in collaboration with provenance research on colonial scientific collections at the University of Freiburg. Students from the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, where Marcel van Eeden serves as rector and professor of painting, contribute their own artistic responses to the series. Their works extend the conversation around memory culture, restitution, and the responsibilities of museums and universities when dealing with sensitive historical material, including human remains held in scientific and medical collections.