Blasts from the Past

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Angelo Soliman is like Humpty Dumpty. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put him back together again. But the Wien Museum has attempted reassembly with its latest exhibition. Ironically, such a process has to divide myth and reality. Who was he? A West African slave, brought to Vienna through Sicily, Soliman became a trusted and respected figure in Enlightenment Vienna. After his death, however, he was exhibited in the Imperial Natural History collections as an exotic. As immigration arguments in Austria reach new intensity, the Wien Museum's Soliman exhibition offers historical guidance.

Soliman begins and ends with a cliché. No Austrians had been to Africa. It was a place where enormous monsters roamed the earth and the people wore fantastical clothing. It was 'other', sexual and ornamental (all depicted in gloriously un-PC imagery). By the time that slaves had arrived in Vienna, the distance between origin and orientalism had only widened. Despite expectation, Soliman gained a relatively privileged position in Viennese society. Normally, once an African slave hit puberty, they were cast out to fend for themselves. And although pictures show him as a dwarf or child servant, he was an adult in service to both Prince Lobkowitz and later the Liechtenstein family. He's depicted in the latter Prince's retinue as he goes to woo a wife and the bill for Soliman's uniform lies next to that picture (in one of many brilliant bits of intense research evident in the exhibition).

Winning a huge amount of money by gambling, Soliman married, bought a house and became an independent man (and was fired by the Liechtensteins for breaking contract). A page from a Masonic Lodge guestbook reveals that he spent time with Mozart. He was the quintessence of Enlightenment thinking. And the Liechtensteins asked him to work with them again towards the end of his life. But after his death, the Enlightenment figure became the exotic cliché once more. Soliman's body was placed in a ludicrous savage's costume and displayed for all to see. Whether as revenge for 'inappropriate' assimilation or for curiosity's sake, Soliman the reality disappeared.

To tell this story, an exhibition needs clarity and space and curator Philipp Blom and his team guide us deftly through cliché to reality (and back again). The final section of the exhibition - linking the racial stereotypes of Soliman's lifetime with those of more recent decades in Vienna - perhaps overstates its case. But it offers an essential bridge to the present day and a final film installation where black Viennese residents talk about their stories and the tolerance (or lack thereof) around them. Have we learned from history? The hushed but powerful question hovers over the exhibition. With immigration debates still raging between the SPÖ and FPÖ, Soliman offers an essential blast from the past.