Wiener Festwochen: Magie des Fremden

10.05.2017 | 18:50 |  Johanna Hofleitner (Die Presse - Schaufenster)

Die Festwochen-Ausstellung „The Conundrum of Imagination“ wirft einen ungewohnten Blick auf das Zeitalter der Entdeckungen.

Bild: (c) Beigestellt 

Der Wunsch, die Welt zu entdecken, prägt die Menschheitsgeschichte seit jeher. Was für Reisende die Sehnsucht nach der Ferne ist, wird aus Sicht von Herrschernationen zum Drang, Territorien zu unterwerfen. Die Karthager erkundeten um 500 v. Chr. Westafrika, die Griechen expandierten zwischen 380 und 310 v. Chr. in den östlichen Mittelmeerraum. Unter der Han-Dynas­tie wurde im zweiten Jahrhundert v. Chr. Zentralasien erforscht, die Wikinger stießen von 800 bis 1040 bis
zum amerikanischen Kontinent vor. Im 13. Jahrhundert erkundeten die Polynesier den Pazifik, die Chinesen 100 Jahre später Süd-, Südostasien sowie die Küste Afrikas.

Kolonialismus einst und jetzt. Von Brisanz, weil von aktueller Relevanz sind heute die Entdeckungsreisen der Neuzeit. Verbunden mit Namen wie Kolumbus, Humboldt, Cook, da Gama, Magellan, Vespucci und anderen haben sie die Kolonialisierungen der Neuzeit eingeleitet. Unter dem Titel „The Conundrum of Imagination (Das Rätsel der Imagination)“ greift die Hauptausstellung der Wiener Festwochen dieses „Europäische Zeitalter der Entdeckungen“ auf. 16 Künstlerinnen und Künstler hat Kurator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung zusammen mit Kokuratorin Pauline Doutreluingne ausgewählt und mit Arbeiten beauftragt. Sie kommen zum Großteil aus Afrika sowie Mittel- und Zentralamerika – mithin aus Ländern, die selbst Teil der europäischen Kolonialgeschichte waren –, aber auch aus Europa wie Ines Doujak oder Ahmet Öğüt. Schauplätze der Ausstellung sind das Leopold-Museum sowie das Performeum, eine aufgelassene Ziegelhalle der ÖBB in der Nähe des Hauptbahnhofs.
„Die Künstlerinnen und Künstler, die wir eingeladen haben, interessieren uns, weil sie in verschiedenen Medien wie Skulptur, Installation, Zeichnung, Film, Fotografie und Performances sehr starke Bilder kreieren“, sagt Doutreluingne. „Für viele ist Kolonialismus zudem ein Teil ihrer Praxis, weil sie aus Ländern kommen, die kolonialisiert worden sind. In gewisser Weise sind sie also selbst Entdecker, die mit ihrer Kunst in die menschliche Psyche hineingehen und Stereotype aufbrechen.“
Der Venezolaner Marco Montiel-Soto etwa bezeichnet sich selbst als Reisenden. Für seine Kunst bricht er immer wieder zu Expeditionen auf. Für die Festwochen-Ausstellung hat er zwei Wochen in einer Pfahlbausiedlung im Maracaibo-See gelebt. Columbus hatte diese Region einst als „kleines Venedig“ bezeichnet, woraus der Name Venezuela hervorgegangen ist. Von den Spaniern wurde die Region von 1528 bis 1545 den Welsern überlassen, die auf der Suche nach dem Dorado ebendort Neu-Nürnberg gründeten. Aufgrund intensiven Gewittergeschehens hat schließlich die Nasa den Maracaibo-See 2016 zur Hauptstadt des Blitzes erklärt. Montiel-Soto nimmt diese Partikel zum Ausgangspunkt für eine poetische Installation, bestehend aus einer Hütte, Blitzen, Videos und Sound. „Ich reise durch Zeiten und Räume“, sagt er. „Aus den Mythen und Legenden, denen ich auf dieser Reise begegne, schaffe ich eine Fiktion.“
Zahlreiche Reisen durch Mittel- und Südamerika haben Ines Doujaks Interesse an kolonialen Themen geprägt. Kolonialismus ist für sie immer noch allgegenwärtig, „zum Beispiel in der Art, über Refugees zu reden“, wie sie sagt. Thema ihres Collagenzyklus „Skins“ ist der Einsatz von Hautkrankheiten als biologischer Waffe. Dafür hat sie historische Medizinatlanten zerschnitten und die Schnipsel zu Mutantenbildern zusammengefügt. „Ich will mit der Arbeit die spezielle Geschichte dieses Kolonialismus beschreiben“, sagt sie. „Die Haut ist für mich eine Grenze zwischen innen und außen, jede Wunde ist eine Öffnung.“

Geschichtsumkehr. Abraham Oghobase aus Lagos wiederum geht für seinen Lithografiezyklus von einer historischen Fiktion aus
und fragt: „Was wäre, wenn Österreich Nigeria kolonialisiert hätte?“ In mehrschichtigen Bil­dern, die aus transparenten Folien, Fotografien, Details aus Google-Maps sowie Farblagen zusammengesetzt sind, führt er Landschaftsfotografien aus Nigeria mit Detailaufnahmen imposanter Salzburger Barockskulpturen zusammen und konstruiert daraus eine fiktionale historische Realität. „Ich bin neugierig“, sagt er, „mich interessieren das Prozesshafte der Lithografie und die Möglichkeit, mit ihr Geschichten zu erzählen.“

The Dutch National Exhibition of Women’s Labor, 1898

In 1898, the year Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was inaugurated, five hundred women organized an enormous public exhibition showcasing women’s contributions to Dutch society as workers in a strikingly broad array of professions. The National Exhibition of Women’s Labor, held in The Hague, was attended by more than ninety thousand visitors. Maria Grever and Berteke Waaldijk consider the exhibition in the international contexts of women’s history, visual culture, and imperialism.
A comprehensive social history, Transforming the Public Sphere describes the planning and construction of the Exhibition of Women’s Labor and the event itself—the sights, the sounds, and the smells—as well as the role of exhibitions in late-nineteenth-century public culture. The authors discuss how the 1898 exhibition displayed the range and variety of women’s economic, intellectual, and artistic roles in Dutch culture, including their participation in such traditionally male professions as engineering, diamond-cutting, and printing and publishing. They examine how people and goods from the Dutch colonies were represented, most notably in an extensive open-air replica of a “Javanese village.” Grever and Waaldijk reveal the tensions the exhibition highlighted: between women of different economic classes; between the goal of equal rights for women and the display of imperial subjects and spoils; and between socialists and feminists, who competed fiercely with one another for working women’s support. Transforming the Public Sphere explores an event that served as the dress rehearsal for advances in women’s public participation during the twentieth century.

Searching for a Global New Feminism / Feminism as Politics!

 
Installation view, Tanja Ostojić, Misplaced Women? (2009–16), mixed media (all photos by author for Hyperallergic)

Most people know the story by now: Feminism’s first wave came with the suffragettes; the second wave with women’s liberation in the 1970s; and the third wave crashed in with riot grrrls and zinesters. Today, a question is bubbling up of whether or not we’ve reached a new wave, a new era in feminism.
It’s certainly the case that there’s been a popular push across feminist media and arts in the US to spotlight the ongoing and long-overlooked contributions of women of color. And women of color–led efforts are rightly taking center stage of their own accord, in movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and the fight for immigrant rights. We’re also seeing a broader recognition that gender equality goes beyond the male/female binary and requires embracing trans and gender-nonconforming people. Which is to say, there’s a growing understanding at a mass scale that all oppressions are linked.

But even saying the above is tricky if you look at the history. Linear or unifying narratives of progress leave a lot out in the desire to preserve a clear story. While many white feminist leaders of the past had a fairly narrow focus, others, along with womanists, have long been looking at oppressions beyond the patriarchy. In the 1970s, for instance, queer women of color were already articulating an intersectional approach to their political work. In other words, the only new development is that intersectionality has moved into popular discourse. At the same time, the kinds of political battles being fought by women who call themselves feminists in the US today can feel worlds apart — from those fighting for access to CEO positions at Fortune 500 companies or to serve on the front lines in the military to women demanding a higher minimum wage or to be given legal status in their own country. If anything, the feminism of today seems more diffuse, varied, and subject to interpretation (or co-optation) than ever before. And that’s just feminism within the US.

Installation view, Mujeres Públicas, “Untitled” (2003–16), wallpaper and matchboxes

These kinds of complications are precisely why the exhibition Feminism as Politics!, curated by Olga Kopenkina and currently on view at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, falls short. Comprised of work by 11 artists and collectives, the exhibition is compact, likely a limitation of both the space and the reality of funding feminist-focused projects. Spanning nine countries, the show centers primarily on works by European and Russian artists, but seems to gesture toward a global perspective with works by practitioners in the US, Guatemala, and Argentina. This tiny, scattered taste left me wondering what’s happening in unrepresented countries and why Kopenkina chose the places that she did. Why, for instance, have such a heavy showing from countries that were part of or adjacent to the USSR without focusing exclusively on that region? That might have allowed for a tighter show with a clearer sense of the worlds in which the artists are working.
Kopenkina’s essay doesn’t offer many ways to better understand her choices. She suggests that the artists in the exhibition are all working to “identify possibilities emerging from the ruins of the global status quo” and draws on the work of academics Stefano Harney and Fred Moten to reference an “undercommons,” or an “antipolitics that emerges from the outraged, endangered, indebted population.” But few of the artists seem to be addressing a global status quo or undercommons directly. She also draws on the work of Isabell Lorey and Jack Halbertstam in trying to define the New Feminism that she’s interested in; related conversations can be found in places like Dissent magazine and the Guardian. Yet her writing remains mostly academic and theory-bound, rather than focusing on how these ideas play out in the artwork itself.

All of which gets at the central contradiction of the show. On the one hand, in her essay, Kopenkina seems to argue against the drive to homogenize culture and political movements: “economic and political precarization has become a neoliberal instrument of governance that does not make any absolute separation between center and margin.” On the other hand, she presents this sampler of artworks with few meaningful insights into the unique political climates that gave rise to them, either assuming that the viewer knows this information or will look it up. Whether it’s intentional or not, by not providing context she ends up homogenizing the work to some extent, or at least obscuring its political specificity, which seems to defeat the purpose of the exhibition and clouds a potentially compelling argument about contemporary feminism no longer having a center or cohesive vision.


Installation view, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, “Toxic” (2012), film, featuring Ginger Brooks Takahashi and Werner Hirsch

This contradiction feels particularly evident in the film work “Toxic” by the Berlin-based duo Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz. In the video, artists Ginger Brooks Takahashi and Werner Hirsch perform dryly as a punk and a drag queen, playing reluctant, even antagonistic, parts for the camera. There are references to the work of queer art figures such as Jean Genet and Catherine Opie, as well as Basquiat, in the fantastical and uneasy mug shots and masks that populate much of the film. Watching it unfold without reading anything about it, you can assume that the work was shot somewhere in Europe (it was indeed shot in Paris) and is intended for those who have experience within Western universities, museums, and galleries. Certainly, that is its own specific context, but it is a liberalized one that aims to be highly transportable and legible to any arts audience. In that context, the terms “feminist” or “queer” become generic statements that don’t articulate the actual values or positions of the people laying claim to them. They become totalizing ambiguities to which viewers can ascribe a great deal of assumed meaning, nodding in presumed agreement, while knowing very little about what the people using the terms actually do in the world to assert their politics. Set within this exhibition,”Toxic” feels vague and, because of that, toothless.

How Dutch Wax Fabrics Became a Mainstay of African Fashion

The Philadelphia Museum of Art examines the past and present of Vlisco fabrics, a symbol of our hyperconnected, postcolonial material world.

Installation view, Vlisco: African Fashion on a Global Stage at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (photo by Tim Tiebout, courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art)

PHILADELPHIA — Riotously colorful, densely patterned, and unassailably fabulous, Vlisco fabrics have, for decades, been tailored into shift dresses, power suits, and formal gowns for Central and West Africa’s cosmopolitan elite. Their patterns and palettes evince an instantly recognizable aesthetic. And there are scores of Vlisco imitators: Chinese knockoffs are sold on city streets all over the world. But are any of these fabrics in fact African? The exhibition Vlisco: African Fashion on a Global Stage, on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) as part of a suite of shows and programs called “Creative Africa,” poses this question in an indirect but intriguing way, by explaining the company’s origins in the Dutch colonial empire and demonstrating its products’ lasting popularity, in African fashion and beyond. Art enthusiasts, for instance, might recognize Vlisco fabrics from the work of Yinka Shonibare MBE, who has used the them to fashion Victorian-style gowns and waistcoats for the generally headless human figures in his haunting installations. In Shonibare’s work, the fabrics do conceptual double duty: they act as a symbol of “African culture,” for those who perceive their patterns to be indigenous, and as a symbol of our hyperconnected, postcolonial material world, for those who understand the complexities of their origins.

Textile pattern by Constance Girard for Vlisco on view in Vlisco: African Fashion on a Global Stage (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

The story of Vlisco begins not in Dakar, Lagos, or Accra, but in the small Dutch city of Helmond, where, in 1846, industrialist Pieter Fentener van Vlissingen purchased a textile factory with the goal of selling upholstery fabric, bedspreads, and handkerchiefs abroad. Van Vlissingen began creating imitation batik fabric based on designs from Indonesia — then known as the Dutch East Indies — with the goal of capitalizing on new roller printing technology that could effect the look of batik without all the labor-intensive work required to make the real thing. Batik originated in China and India in the 8th century, and it was refined in 13th-century Indonesia with the development of a new tool for applying hot wax to fabric known as canting, likely an anglicized form of the word tjanting. When Dutch imitators such as van Vlissingen entered the business, Indonesians noticed small flaws in their fabrics — namely a “crackle” effect, the result of small veins of pigment leaking through the wax resist — and the Dutch East Indies even went so far as to ban their sale in the 19th century. But other areas of the Dutch empire provided a ready, if unexpected, marketplace. Vlisco fabrics became a popular item in a different part of the Dutch colonial ecosystem, starting in Ghana, which was then called the Gold Coast.
The Vlisco factory in the 1950s–60s (image courtesy Vlisco)

The Vlisco factory in the 1950s–60s (image courtesy Vlisco)

Between 1855 and 1872, approximately 3,000 Ghanian soldiers served in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army. They returned home, as servicemen often do, with a taste for items they encountered abroad. As the story goes, the soldiers had learned to appreciate the look of genuine batik but didn’t mind the crackle of the van Vlissingen version, so they purchased bolts of it for their female relatives back in Ghana. By the turn of the century, despite the ceding of the colony to the UK, the sale of Dutch-made faux batik in the Gold Coast was robust. By the 1930s, it was being adapted to suit Ghanian tastes, not by accident, but by design. According to Dilys Blum, the PMA’s senior curator of costume and textiles who organized the exhibition, the trend was so popular that several companies based in England, France, and Switzerland began producing faux batik fabrics in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Van Vlissingen responded by consolidating its grip on the marketplace and buying up several smaller concerns. Thus, a fabric produced in Europe with Asia in mind never quite hit the mark in its intended marketplace, but found an enthusiastic audience at the opposite end of the empire.

Lygia Clark (String Figures)

Artist: Chris Ofili Venue: New Museum, New York

The Invisible Man (2015) sculpture and photo series

 

The Invisible Man by Zina Saro-Wiwa copyThe Invisible Man is a neo-Ogoni mask created by Zina Saro-Wiwa. Inspired by the newer “Ogele style” masquerade masks that have started appearing in Ogoniland in the late 1980s, the mask is one that depicts the men that have disappeared in Zina’s life through death or through their own design. Brother, father, lovers and illusive Ogele dancers feature on the Janus-faced mask. The black and white face representing the sadness of loss, the lined pink face the anger associated with abandonment. Worn by women only.



The Invisible Man: “The Weight of Absence” (2015) Video Triptych
The Invisible Man: “The Weight of Absence” (2015) 6 mins, video triptych, is the first video featuring and inspired by Zina’s Invisible Man mask commissioned by Seattle Art Museum for their Disguise exhibition. The triptych is a response to the detachment inherent in the display of African masks in museums. It is in direct conversation with Disguise’s remit of “bridging the gap between the mask observed in isolation and the masquerade experienced as a catalyst”. The gap, as Saro-Wiwa sees it, is brought about by emotional and cognitive disconnection to African masks and the performance of masquerade. This work and the very creation of Zina’s Invisible Man mask attempts to bring emotional discourse and emotional connectivity to a masquerade practise whose psycho-emotional geographies are diffuse:

“I wanted to create a masquerade “performance” that subverted even Seattle Art Museum’s expectations of what such a performance should look like. I didn’t just want to gather my all-female troupe have them dance with the mask I designed, film the process and say “here you go”.  That might have been radical enough – having an all-female troupe, is subversive in itself – but I wanted to go further and challenge the museum’s ideas of what it means to “perform a masquerade”. I also wanted to challenge masquerade in Nigeria by going within and opening up emotional terrains. Many masks in Ogoni play on fears, talk about farming, make political statements. But I wanted to go to a more emotionally-specific place. The Invisible Man is about me creating a mask I could connect to. So I picked a highly emotional subject that had a particular resonance for me.  This work is about my attempt to map the emotional geography of masquerade, to get it to tell a more intimate story and to see if creating this mask and performance had any carthatic properties. There is a magic in masquerade that I do not understand. But I am attempting to tap into it through this work.”

conflict and skin: the persistence of victorian design in namibian women’s fashion

Catherine mckinley, gallatin ma

MARCH 11TH – MARCH 27TH, 2016

Curatorial Statement

In 1884, present-day Namibia was annexed under German colonial rule as part of what was to become South West Africa. Within a decade, German imperial troops were installed to enforce state rule, provoking formidable resistance by the dominant Herero and Namaqua people. The German army responded with a campaign to remove the groups from their ancestral lands, marking the start of the German-Herero War (1904-1907). By the war’s end, an estimated eighty percent of the population, including Himba and other peoples, had been killed by the Germans. It was the first genocide of the twentieth century and a chilling rehearsal for later Nazi atrocities.
The German-Herero War centered on the enormous profitability of both human bodies and cattle skins. What played out on the “native” body through acts of labor exploitation and racial cleansing also deeply implicated sartorial, social-cultural, and traditional religious values of the Herero and Himba, in particular. The cow, the human body, and God were considered to be one and the same. “Herero-ness” and other clan identities, the sustaining of cattle wealth, and custom were expressed in large measure by a literal embodiment of the cow. Cow ownership, as well as a particular wearing of skins, and a feminine ideal of “walking like a cow,” were set off by sartorial forms that celebrated the cow’s form and bored majesty and its associated dowry wealth.
In Namibia, fashions of the Herero and their closely related clan cousins, the Himba, become monuments to the genocide which has otherwise been almost entirely erased. Both groups—summoning the body of the cow—whether with Western imported cloth and notions, skins, and “nakedness,” express radically different relationships to Victorian colonial legacies. They also express pleasure in Western and contemporary design and form, while marking a decided resistance to colonialism and the violence enacted on women’s bodies through genocide and racial cleansing.
Conflict and Skin exams the politics and colonial legacies of Namibian fashion, particularly as iterations of “national costume” and notions of “indigeneity” —the practice of indigenous culture despite colonial impositions.
How does the legacy of genocide explain the staying power of these radically different but kindred forms? How do they radicalize, vulgarize, and provide distance from the genocide?
Engaging the work of the late award-winning South African photographer Thabiso Sekgala and Ghanaian-American couture designer Mimi Plange’s Herero-inspired collection “Flower in the Desert” (Spring 2012), Conflict and Skin examines contemporary African photography and dressmaking, as well as images and costume from the archive. Through these dresses and fashion, I hope to show the legacy of colonialism and to demonstrate the resistance and trauma of the Herero people.

-Catherine Mckinley

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IBEJI – TWICE BORN

Twin sculptures of the Yoruba people from the Pavlich collection

December 2015 – June 2016
Exhibition curator: Aleksandra Prodanović Bojović
The Museum of African Art presents the topic of twins in African art and culture with an exhibition of twin statues of the Yoruba people from the Pavlich art collection. These sculptures belong to the twin cult of the Yoruba people, who have the highest twin birth rate in the world. At this multimedia exhibition visitors can learn about the Yoruba beliefs and customs concerning twins, listen to a praise song dedicated to twins, and see an interview with a priest of the Yoruba traditional religion on the importance of twins for the Yoruba.

Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte

Helen Harris und Dr. Spunk Seipel kuratieren eine Ausstellung, die unter dem Titel „1884 to 1915- an artistic position“ bis zum 12. März 2016 in der National Art Gallery of Namibia in Windhoek zu sehen ist. Künstler aus Namibia und aus Deutschland zeigen Arbeiten, „wie man mit dem deutschen Kolonialismus, seine Verbrechen und die Verletzungen, die er bis heute hinterlassen hat, umgehen kann.“ 1868 hatte zwar der spätere Reichskanzler Bismarck in einem Brief an den preußischen König den Erwerb von Übersee-Kolonien abgelehnt, doch nach 1870 gewann in der deutschen Politik die Kolonialpropaganda die Oberhand. 1884 beginnt schließlich eine systematisch angelegte Kolonialpolitik, als die vom Bremer Kaufmann Adolf Lüderitz erworbenen Besitzungen als „Deutsch-Südwestafrika“ unter den Schutz des Reiches gestellt wurden. 1914 war Deutschland schließlich nach England, Frankreich, Russland und den Niederlanden die fünftgrößte Kolonialmacht. Das deutsche Kolonialregime im heutigen Namibia war durch Grausamkeit gekennzeichnet: nach einer Viehseuche beanspruchten Großgrundbesitzer die überlebenden Viehbestände der Herero für sich. Den Aufstand der Herero schlug eine 15.000 Mann starke deutsche Kolonialarmee 1904 blutig nieder, die Überlebenden ließ die deutsche Militärführung in der Wüste verdursten. Bis 1908 kamen durch diesen Völkermord ca. 90.000 Herero und Nama ums Leben. In der öffentlichen gesellschaftlichen Diskussion spielte die deutsche Kolonialgeschichte mit solchen kriegsverbrecherischen Begleitumständen gegenüber anderen Themen keine größere Rolle; die Ausstellung betritt damit Neuland: bisher gab es in Deutschland kaum künstlerische Arbeiten, die sich mit diesem Teil der politischen Geschichte befassten. „Es ist eine Ausstellung, die keine definitive Aussage über dieses schwierige Kapitel der Geschichte geben kann, aber aufzeigt, wie wir alle damit umgehen können.“ Künstlerliste: Diana Arce, Matthias Beckmann, Berlin Postkolonial, Tahir Della, Melody Laverne Bettencourt , Nicola Brandt , Ondrej Brody & Kristofer Paetau, Judith Egger, Thomas Eller, Abrie Fourie, Tim Huepschle, Phillip Luhl, Nicky Marais, Philip Kojo Metz, Moholi Ndikung, Veico Ponofi & Nambahu Karina, Oliver Ressler, Spunk Seipel, Eric Schnak, Papa Shikongeni, Andrew van Wyk, Ella Ziegler.

Messages from a New America

    
    
October 25, 2015
10th Mercosul Biennial
Messages from a New America
October 23–December 6, 2015

www.fundacaobienal.art.br
The 10th Mercosul Biennial has opened to the public in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and runs from October 23 to  December 6. This edition of the biennial is dedicated exclusively to art from Latin America, searching for its roots and presenting a new curatorial model that goes against the grain by including works from the early 18th century to the present. Titled Messages from a New America, this large-scale exhibition seeks to break new ground on shifting the attention to innovative curatorial platforms for the art of Latin America. The 10th Mercosul Biennial is curated by art historian and curator Dr. Gaudêncio Fidelis (Brazil), Chief Curator Márcio Tavares (Brazil), Adjunct Curator, Assistant Curator Ana Zavadil (Brazil), and Educational Curator Cristián G. Gallegos (Chile).

The Biennial consists of seven major exhibitions, interconnected and built to encompass a number of issues concerning the art of the region, some of which are dealt with for the first time anywhere, such as smell and dust as material reality of the art objects. The exhibitions are: The Biography of Urban Life; Modernism in Parallax; Neobaroque Anthropophagy; Olfactory: Smell in Art; Body Apparatuses; Dust and the World of Objects; and Marginália of Form. The Biennial occupies several venues throughout the city of Porto Alegre, including the Rio Grande do Sul Museum of Art, Santander Cultural, Mercosul Museum of Human Rights, Usina do Gasômetro, CEEE Cultural Center, Acervo Independente, and InstitutoLing.

"This biennial represents a unique opportunity to view a vast range of work alongside each other and introduces a new model for exhibitions within a biennial context. It was created by choosing specific works, encompassing an extensive arc spanning from the historical to the contemporary. Instead of representing artists, we sought to highlight their artistic contributions related to specific issues," says Mr. Fidelis.

"This platform abandons the model of commissions that is typical of biennials and focused instead on searching for works that show the extraordinary field of aesthetics that appears throughout the historical trajectory of creativity that brings forth sources for innovation and creativity. The exhibition takes into account legibility, cultural specificity, historical priority and criticism of the Western canon, thereby reactivating, producing and circulating original knowledge about these works instead of just celebrating them."

The curatorial platform of the 10th Biennial includes canonical and non-canonical works, as well as works considered by the curators as "blind spots" due to a conspicuous absence from criticism, art history narratives and curatorial endeavors which have failed to take such works into account.

Penny Siopis

Mo, 26. Jan 2015, 20 Uhr

William Blake, Nebukadnezar

Penny Siopis ist eine der bekanntesten Filmemacherinnen und Künstlerinnen Südafrikas. Sie spricht im Rahmen einer Kooperation mit den 16. dresdener schmalfilmtagen am 25. Januar im Kunsthaus Dresden mit der Kuratorin Sophie Goltz über ihr Gesamtwerk. Neben ihren filmischen Arbeiten, die während der 16. dresdner schmalfilmtage am 23. Januar vorgestellt werden, ist die vielseitige Künstlerin für ihre Werke in Malerei, Fotografie und Installation bekannt. Durch ihre künstlerische Auseinandersetzung mit afrikanischer Geschichte und Erinnerung gilt sie als wichtige Analytikerin von Rassen- und Genderfragen. Mit ihrer Kunst kritisiert sie seit den 1980er Jahren auf deutliche und dennoch subtile Weise die Folgen des Kolonialismus und des Apartheidsregimes. Häufig stehen Frauenfiguren im Zentrum ihres Interesses, wie beispielsweise in der Ende der 1980er Jahre entstandenen Fotoarbeit über Saartjie Baartman. Die Südafrikanerin Bartman wurde als Khoi-San Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts auf Völkerschauen in Europa präsentiert. Von ihrem Körper wurden Abgüsse gemacht, er selbst nach ihrem Tod ausgestopft und fand Eingang in Museumssammlungen. Andere Arbeiten von Siopis beschäftigen sich weiter mit der Suche nach Widerstand gegen das Patriarchat, zu sehen in einer Reihe von Publikationen über Dora – einer der Patientinnen, denen Sigmund Freud Hysterie diagnostizierte. Seit dem Ende der Apartheid ist Scham das zentrale Thema ihrer Arbeiten. Sie verbindet dabei persönliche Erinnerungen mit kollektiven Erfahrungen und befragt kritisch die gesellschaftliche Gegenwart in Südafrika.

PERSONNE ET LES AUTRES VINCENT MEESSEN AND GUESTS

 

Belgian Pavilion
56th international art exhibition - Biennale di Venezia
9 May - 22 November 2015
Curator: Katerina Gregos

The Belgian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale will present the work of the Belgian artist Vincent Meessen (Baltimore, 1971, lives in Brussels), together with international guest artists. His project Personne et les autres breaks with the tradition of Belgium’s representation in Venice to date, which has mostly featured solo or duo exhibitions of Belgian artists. The artist’s project, selected to represent Belgium at the Biennale, challenges the notion of national representation, by moving away from the traditional format of a solo show and opening up to include multiple positions and voices.
Working in close collaboration, Meessen and Brussels-based curator Katerina Gregos have developed an international, thematic, discursive, contemplative group exhibition of a poetic as well as political nature, which is grounded in research-based practices. The exhibition welcomes ten other artists from four continents and – for the first time in the Pavilion – artists from Africa, all of whose work has probed the question of colonial modernity, and most of who are producing new work for the exhibition.
The title of the exhibition, Personne et les autres, is borrowed from a lost play by André Frankin, a Belgian art critic affiliated with the Lettrist and Situationist Internationals. The exhibition takes the history of the Belgian Pavilion and the international context of the Biennale (both derived from the colonial exhibitions and world expositions) as its points of departure to explore the consequences of political, historical, cultural and artistic entanglements between Europe and Africa during the time of colonial modernity, and in its aftermath. The Belgian Pavilion itself was the first foreign Pavilion to be built in the Giardini in Venice, during the reign of King Leopold II. Meessen’s own work and artistic research have consistently explored and questioned the history and afterlife of colonial modernity.

Vincent Meessen / Thela Tendu

 
Der Künstler wird zum Kurator
12.2.2015, 15:14 Uhr
Vincent Meessen macht uns in der Kunsthalle Basel mit dem Werk von Thela Tendu bekannt. Das tut der belgische Künstler auf derartig vielschichtige Weise, dass uns fast schwummrig wird – wir am Schluss aber trotzdem überzeugt sind. Von Karen N. Gerig

Philipp Hänger: Ein-, Auf- und Durchblicke: Die Ausstellungsarchitektur von Vincent Meessen in der Kunsthalle Basel.
Ein-, Auf- und Durchblicke: Die Ausstellungsarchitektur von Vincent Meessen in der Kunsthalle Basel. (Bild: Philipp Hänger)
Nehmen wir es vorweg: Wenn man Vincent Meessens Ausstellung in der Kunsthalle Basel wirklich verstehen will, dann kommt man nicht umhin, sich zumindest den Saaltext zu Gemüte zu führen. Denn was der Belgier in den fünf Räumen, die ihm zugewiesen wurden, installiert hat, ist derartig vielschichtig, dass selbst mit Anleitung kaum alles gesehen und gelesen werden kann.

Davon sollte man sich nun aber nicht abschrecken lassen – denn auch wenn man nicht gern lesen mag, so gibt es vielerlei zu sehen und zu entdecken.

Ein Widerspruch? Keineswegs. Es folgt der Versuch einer Erklärung.



Fünf Räume, die fast alle demselben visuellen Muster folgen. Konstruktionen aus Holz und Platten in Silber, Schwarz und Weiss. Bilder mit geometrischen Mustern, die eindeutig von Hand gezeichnet sind. Filmprojektionen, in denen visuelle Tests mit Afrikanern durchgeführt werden. Studien in Buchform, die von solchen Tests berichten. Kleine Objekte aus Holz, die einen rituellen Charakter besitzen. Eine Soundinstallation, die in abstrakter Form Wortfetzen und Klänge miteinander verbindet.
Meessen bedient sich der unterschiedlichsten Medien. Bald wird klar, dass er hier mehr als Kurator denn als Autor der Werke fungiert. Die Zeichnungen an den Wänden sind gezeichnet mit dem Namen Thela Tendu, die Bücher stammen von André Ombredane, der identisch ist mit dem Herrn weisser Hautfarbe, der in den Filmen die Tests durchführt.


Bücher von André Ombredane auf einer Tischarchitektur. (Bild: Philipp Hänger)

Scratch the Surface

Britain's involvement in the slave trade started when Elizabethan adventurer John Hawkins made a voyage to the coast of Sierra Leone, West Africa in 1562 with 100 men and three ships. While there, he kidnapped 300 people, sailed to the Caribbean and sold them to Spanish settlers.
Over the subsequent centuries, many people made their fortunes in the slave trade and related businesses such as banking, manufacturing and shipbuilding. These merchants commissioned paintings and collected art to show off their wealth and impress the traditional elite in the 18th century.
This exhibition examined the role that the slave trade played in the lives of two people featured in portraits in our collection: Zoffany's portrait of 'Mrs Oswald' and Sir Joshua Reynolds's 'Colonel Tarleton'.
Colonel Tarleton, as MP for Liverpool in the 1790s, argued very strongly in Parliament against the abolition of the trade. Mrs Oswald, along with her husband Richard Oswald, owed part of their wealth to a number of plantations in the Americas. The painting of Mrs Oswald was bought by the Gallery in 1938, while the Tarleton portrait was bequeathed to the Gallery by one of his descendants in the early 1950s.
As part of the exhibition, 2004 Turner Prize nominee, Yinka Shonibare MBE, was invited to create a new installation in response to these two portraits. This stunning new work went on display in the Barry Rooms.
'Scratch the Surface' is part of a range of activities and events that the National Gallery took part in commemorate the 200th anniversary of the 1807 Act to abolish the British trade in African people. Although the Act did not end slavery itself, it was the first attempt by the British to legally bring the trade to a close.

social fabric - exhibition

   
Manchester cotton, courtesy of Joss Graham.

Social Fabric
19 January–10 March 2012



Iniva presents Social Fabric, an exhibition that uses textiles to explore colonial history, international trade, labour and militant politics. In the 19th century Karl Marx gave an account of the cotton trade tracking fifty years of boom and bust and the effects this had on workers in Britain and the colonies. This exhibition cross references different accounts of textile history, focusing on works by two contemporary artists Sudhir Patwardhan and Alice Creischer, presented alongside an extensive range of recent and historical archival material.

Alice Creischer's large-scale installation Apparatus for the Osmotic Compensation of the Pressure of Wealth during the Contemplation of Poverty tracks the threads that connect cycles of investment, disinvestment and decline. Inspired by a trip to India, the work looks at the economic and social impact of European colonialism and subsequent globalization. The craze for Indian Chintz caused protest amongst Spitalfields weavers in 1719, and a century later the restrictions on imports and the flooding of the Indian market turned the country from exporter to an importer, and devastated whole sections of its textile industry. This led to Gandhi's choice of the spinning wheel as a symbol of decolonisation, and caused Nehru to comment that—the history of cotton and textiles is not only the history of growth of modern industry in India, but in a sense it might be considered the history of India.'

Since the mid-1970s, Sudhir Patwardhan has depicted Mumbai and its urban proletariat. His painting Lower Parel (2001) shows 'Girangaon' (mill village) where the cotton mills that transformed the city's economy and led the Indian industrial revolution were located. By the 1970s textiles employed one in three of the city's workers and sucked in migrants from surrounding regions. New social institutions evolved with forms of cultural expression including street theatre, poetry and music. It was a hub for trade union activity and left politics. Lower Parel depicts this area after the mills closed following the 1982–3 strike, the largest and longest in history. It superimposes different urban strata—defunct factories, new small scale enterprises and high rise luxury apartments and invokes the workers struggle to keep the mills going and resist gentrification.

References in these works are developed through an extensive display of archival loans and artist interventions, including Company Paintings, Indian Chintz, Marx's journals, films, photographs, newspaper articles and recordings of mill workers testimonies. A curtain and two support structures, a table and wall unit, have been designed by Celine Condorelli to display the archival material.

A dynamic programme of events runs alongside the exhibition, including film screenings, talks by the artists, a workshop with Indian trade unionist Meena Menon, and a symposium.

Artists in the exhibition: Alice Creischer, Celine Condorelli, Archana Hande, Sudhir Patwardhan, Raqs Media Collective, Andreas Siekmann.

Screening programme: Ashim Ahluwalia, Anjali Monteiro, K.P. Jayasankar, The Otolith Group, Madhusree Dutta, Tushar Joag, Anand Patwardhan.

Research: Meena Menon, Jyotindra Jain, Prasad Shetty and Rupali Gupte.

Social Fabric is curated by Grant Watson, in collaboration with Christine Checinska, Nida Ghouse, Shanay Jhaveri, Nada Raza and Karen Roswell.

Social Fabric will tour to Lunds Konsthall from the 6th of April to the 27th of May 2012.


Social Fabric Symposium - Saturday 10 March, 10am–5pm.
Programmed by Christine Checinska, speakers include Professors Sarat Maharaj, John Hutnyk, Janis Jeffries and artist Sudhir Patwardhan. In collaboration with the Royal College of Art. Check www.iniva.org for venue and booking details.