Founded in 1904, Frankfurt's Weltkulturen Museum houses a remarkable collection of ethnographic artifacts from Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, with the aims of advancing public education and fostering innovative anthropological research across a wide variety of contemporary artistic practices.
Developed through artistic research in the Weltkulturen Museum's Weltkulturen Labor research lab, "Foreign Exchange" raises questions about the relationship between the museum's educational and scientific aims and global trade. Together, essays by anthropologists, art historians, artists, and curators form an extended conversation around the historical accumulation and commodification of artifacts and, in particular, the representation of the human body in ethnographic photographs. Rounding out the volume are many previously unpublished photographs of works discussed. Contributing authors and artist include Peggy Buth, Minerva Cuevas, Gabriel Gbadamosi, David Lau, Tom McCarthy, David Weber-Krebs, and Luke Willis-Thompson.

El Hadji Sy is one of the most significant figures in African contemporary art. Since the late 1970s, the Senegalese artist and curator has helped shape the country's thriving art scene through his innovative painting and performance art. But El Sy is also an internationally recognized activist, having founded the collectives Laboratoire Agit-Art and Tenq, which aim to create contemporary art that engages with the country's pressing social and political issues. The first comprehensive publication on El Sy, this book places the artist's work in the context of activism in Senegal since the country gained independence from France in 1960. Included are critical essays by Hans Belting, Elvira Dyangani Ose, and Pablo Lafuente who explore post independence aesthetics and the effect of postwar relations between Germany and Senegal. The critical essays are supplemented with copious illustrations from the artist's archive - many never before seen - offering rare insight into African art before the Global Turn of 1989.