Sufferhead Original

Sufferhead Original is an ongoing, site-responsive project that uses beer, taste, branding, advertising and public space to explore migration, belonging and the construction of identity. Initiated in Berlin in 2015, the work has developed through a series of editions produced in different European cities, each responding to the people, histories and cultural contexts of its location.

The project began with surveys conducted among Black expatriates living in Europe, drawing on experiences and memories associated with taste, smell, food and everyday life. These preferences were translated into the flavour profile of a beer, developed in collaboration with local breweries. Taste becomes a way of approaching movement and adaptation through the senses: experiences that can be consumed, shared and circulated rather than represented solely through image or language.

The choice of beer is central to the project. In Germany, beer is closely associated with the Reinheitsgebot, commonly referred to as the German Beer Purity Law. Sufferhead Original takes the idea of “purity” as a point of departure, placing the regulated language of beer in proximity to wider European discussions around identity, belonging and difference. The work does not equate these histories, but uses the notion of purity to open a space in which the cultural construction of what is considered authentic, native or foreign can be considered.

Colour forms another layer of this relationship. Beer is classified through colour scales ranging from pale to extremely dark, a visual gradation that, for the artist, recalls pictorial scales used to represent variations in human skin tone. Sufferhead Original therefore adopts the Imperial Stout as its default beer style, positioning the beer at the darkest end of this spectrum. Its near-black colour becomes part of the work’s visual language, establishing an association with melanin and Blackness that runs through the beer, its branding and its advertising imagery.

The title Sufferhead Original draws from Fela Kuti’s Original Sufferhead while simultaneously adopting the language of commercial branding. From its earliest iterations, the beer was conceived not only as a beverage but as a brand with its own visual and sonic identity. Bottles, labels, slogans, jingles, photographs, infomercials and advertising campaigns extend the work beyond taste into the mechanisms through which commodities are given identity, desirability and cultural value.

For documenta 14 in Kassel in 2017, the project expanded into the infrastructure of the city. Thousands of bottles circulated alongside billboards, a television commercial and radio jingle. Sufferhead Original could therefore be encountered not only within an exhibition context but through the familiar systems of everyday consumption and advertising. The distinction between artwork and commodity becomes deliberately unstable: the beer can be purchased, consumed and circulated as a product while remaining part of a larger artistic proposition.

Subsequent editions have continued to transform according to place. Taste research with Black expatriate and diasporic communities informs variations in the beer, while accompanying photographs, films and advertising campaigns respond to the specific histories of each city. Across Berlin, Baden-Baden, Frankfurt, Paris, Munich and Basel, Black protagonists appear within spaces connected to European cultural, political and colonial histories, while the visual language of lifestyle and beverage advertising is redirected towards questions of visibility, presence and belonging.

The project therefore moves through several overlapping systems of circulation: people move across borders; ingredients and tastes travel and change; beer enters commercial networks; images circulate through advertising; and historical narratives reappear within contemporary urban space. Each edition retains the recognisable identity of Sufferhead Original while being altered by the place in which it is produced.

Rather than functioning as a fixed recipe or a single object, Sufferhead Original operates as an evolving artistic framework. Beer, taste, colour, sound, image and public space become interconnected materials through which questions of purity, difference, cultural memory and belonging can continually be reformulated.