In August 1944, a quarter of a million soldiers landed on the beaches of Provence. Most of them were African. They fought through southern France, pushed the Wehrmacht northward, and helped end Nazi occupation. Then, for the better part of eighty years, Europe forgot them. Not forgot — that implies an accident. This was something more deliberate: a sustained, structural act of erasure, the kind that requires effort to maintain across decades of textbooks, monuments, and national mythologies. The exhibition opening at Haus der Kulturen der Welt on 21 March, Tirailleurs: Trials and Tribulations — From Cannon Fodder to Avant-Garde, is an attempt to reverse that current.

The timing is not incidental. In August 2024, Emmanuel Macron hosted a ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the Provence landings — Operation Dragoon, the less famous sibling of D-Day. African heads of state were invited. Le Monde reported on the colonial soldiers who "came from the colonies." The spectacle was, by most accounts, a classic commemorative gesture: visible enough to claim credit, thin enough to avoid reckoning. Tirailleurs at HKW picks up where that ceremony's press photos left off, and pushes considerably further.

The project is led by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, artistic director of HKW since 2023 and previously the founder of SAVVY Contemporary, a Berlin project space that spent over a decade doing the kind of diasporic, post-colonial, thoroughly transnational curatorial work this exhibition demands. Ndikung's Cameroonian background places him within the broader geography the Tirailleurs were drawn from — West and Central Africa — though the exhibition is not a personal project so much as an institutional argument. The word "avant-garde" in the subtitle is not decorative. It is a claim: that these soldiers were not merely victims to be pitied or heroes to be cast in bronze, but agents who reshaped the cultural and political conditions of 20th-century Europe. That is a genuinely ambitious thesis, and whether the exhibition can sustain it across three months and over twenty-five artists remains to be seen.

The roster is multigenerational and wide-ranging. Kader Attia, whose long engagement with colonial trauma and the concept of "repair" anchors one end; Josèfa Ntjam, whose video Dislocations (2022) — co-produced with Palais de Tokyo and the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center — uses speculative fiction to fracture linear colonial narratives, at the other. The most striking inclusion on paper is Tiffany Chung, who presents a newly commissioned embroidered textile that explicitly connects Tirailleurs to Japanese military "comfort women" and colonial worker-soldiers. This is the move that signals the exhibition's real ambition: widening the frame from France's specific amnesia to a global pattern of wartime exploitation and subsequent forgetting. Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn contributes a two-channel video installation, Our Empty Uniforms Marched To The Echoes Of An Invisible, that draws on audio from the Lautarchiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin — a phonographic archive whose own history is entangled with colonial-era ethnographic recording. Several works are new commissions, and the exhibition incorporates research from international art spaces and collectives including Raw Material Company in Dakar and Alice Yard in Port of Spain, which signals that this is not a project content to view colonial military history through a purely European lens.

The film programme deepens the historical register. Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow's Camp de Thiaroye (1988) — a searing dramatisation of the 1944 massacre of Tirailleurs by the French army at a transit camp in Senegal — remains a landmark of African cinema's engagement with colonial betrayal. Rachid Bouchareb's Indigènes (2006), released in English as Days of Glory, was the film that forced the French government to equalise military pensions for African veterans. Philip Scheffner, a Berlin-based documentarian whose forensic investigations of Germany's colonial afterlives — including his work on the Herero and Nama genocide — brings a specifically German perspective to a history that Germany has largely treated as someone else's problem. The screening programme spans several decades and continents.

What happens inside HKW's Kongresshalle carries its own layer of irony. The building — that shell-shaped Cold War relic designed by Hugh Stubbins, funded by American money for the 1957 Interbau exhibition as a symbol of Western democratic values — now houses an exhibition about the African soldiers whose sacrifice underwrote the freedom it was built to celebrate, and who were then denied its benefits. The architecture was built as propaganda. The exhibition repurposes it as an act of correction. The subtitle frames the show as "a common space for celebration and deliberation" — language that insists on both joy and criticality, refusing the earnest solemnity that often deadens institutional engagements with difficult history.

The opening weekend is programmed to match. Keynote lectures from David Olusoga, whose work on Black British history and the First World War has been central to bringing colonial military service into mainstream Anglophone consciousness, and Santanu Das, whose scholarship on the sensory and emotional lives of colonial soldiers in wartime is richly textured. Live music from Cheikh Lô, the Senegalese singer whose blend of mbalax, jazz, and Afro-Cuban rhythms has made him one of West Africa's most internationally recognised musicians. The opening is programmed as an event, not a preview.

The question that hovers over everything is the one that hovers over all institutional post-colonial exhibitions in 2026: does it move anything beyond the walls? Germany's engagement with its own role in the Tirailleur story — not just as France's neighbour but as the country these soldiers helped liberate — remains remarkably thin. The exhibition's stated goal of addressing how "unknown" this history is "especially in Germany today" is honest, but it also reveals the scale of the task. Cultural education programmes will run throughout the three-month span, and free entry on Mondays and select Sundays lowers the material barrier. Whether this reaches beyond HKW's existing audience — already primed for this kind of engagement — is the real test.

What Ndikung appears to be attempting is an argument: that the exclusion of African soldiers from Europe's liberation narrative is not a footnote but a foundational distortion, one that warps how Europe understands its own freedom, its own modernity, its own supposed universalism. The avant-garde referenced in the title is not an art-historical category. It is literal. These soldiers were the advance guard. They went first. And then they were written out of the story that their bodies made possible.