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Tenacious Tropes: Colonial Narratives in Visual Advertising

International Symposium

Together with the Deutsches Historisches Museum, the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin is organising the international symposium “Tenacious Tropes: Colonial Narratives in Visual Advertising” on 21 and 22 November 2025 at Kulturforum Berlin.

Advertising pervades the modern world. For over 150 years, we have been flooded daily with colourful images designed to encourage consumption. Burnt into our collective memory, image-based advertising perpetuates visual patterns that often go back to their beginnings in the 19th century – an era characterised by imperialist thinking and action in Europe and North America. As remnants of a colonialist visual language, many often discriminatory stereotypes have tenaciously persisted in advertising motifs to this day, from “Orient Food” to “Chocolate Magician.”

The two-day symposium traces the origins of colonial narratives in visual advertising from the heyday of colonialism around 1900 to the present day. Three city tours and fourteen lectures by international experts will present topics with a German connection as well as perspectives from India, Cameroon, Korea, Brazil, France, Sweden, the Netherlands, and other countries. The subjects range from “stereotypography” and exoticism in AI images to the marketing of food, travel, and houseplants to the instrumentalization of Black bodies.

The complete programme can be found here

The symposium is bilingual: presentations will be held in German or English and simultaneously translated. This is an in-person event.

Registration

Participation is free of charge after registration. As the number of participats is limited, we recommend early reservation – please send an email to kolonialnarrative[at]smb.spk-berlin.de

The symposium “Tenacious Tropes” was initiated by the Art Library, Berlin State Museums, on the occasion of the conclusion of the research project “Colonial Contexts in Early Posters.” It is organized in cooperation with the Deutsches Historisches Museum and supported by the Stiftung Stadtmuseum.