Samenvatting

Iwishiwas is the name of the piece by Afro-German artist Philip Metz, a photograph and portrait of a “self” and certainly much more than a wish – it also represents a biographic document, that raises questions about our contemporary conditions of being-in-the-world as Black (1) subjects. The short agglutination iwishiwas (“Ich wünscht ich wär”) represents a longing to escape a current situation.
In this article I am discussing the parameters of how to approach contemporary Black artists in the diaspora. By doing so, I propose the term post-black as one way of describing a generation of artists, who deliver new ways of defining idea(s) of Blackness.