Antiracist Curatorial Practice
Book presentation and talk by Natalie Bayer and Nuray Demir
1h 25’32”
The anthology reflects upon museums and exhibitions from the perspective of postcolonial museology and critical migration and regime research. Beyond critical analysis, this collection of texts is about collecting strategies and forms of action that make it possible to think of curating as anti-racist practice. Using as springboards the intersections between social battlefields and curatorial practices, as well as a focus on agency, this book examines the relationality of struggles for and against representation. Therefore, the focus is on discursive strategies of resistance, contact zones and approaches to re-appropriation. The publication contains contributions from theory, art and activism to new perspectives of the art and culture industry, which refer to transnational approaches, counter narratives and alternative forms of action.
15.3.2019, ifa-Galerie Berlin
Elsa M`bala: Sequence
Performance
33’20”
Sequence is a project initiated by Elsa M’bala for the ifa-Galerie Berlin. Together with visual jokey Zoey Vero the two artists are planning an ode to female livelihood on this international day of the woman. From the beginning of creation until today, ranging from motherhood to divine female energy present in each one of us, M’bala will sonically explore the possibilities for freedom in this ancestral knowledge. Throughout generations and cultures women have been the leading powers towards change and social justice. During the evening, the words and voices of different female social leaders will be looped and transformed into musical pieces, accompanied by powerful visuals. The evening will begin and close with M’bala’s previous radio works.
The healing powers of female*hood is to be celebrated.
8.3.2019, ifa-Galerie Berlin
Resonances
Opening Resonances and
ARK – Arkestrated Rhythmachine Komplexities
Resonances
1.3.2019, 7pm
Opening, presentation, performance
Resonances
1.3.2019 — 16.3.2019
space for research and encounter
Resonances (rez.ən.ənsez) is a space for research and encounter at ifa-Galerie Berlin. Reflecting each chapter and exhibition of Movement.Bewegung, the platform brings together voices, thoughts and actions of allies and collaborators who have inspired and contributed to the Untie to Tie programme.
Mischa Leinkauf and Sandra Noeth:
Two lectures and a dialogue
What does it take to cross a border?
23.2.2019, 8pm
Talk
Quarto:
Communal Rope
What does it take to cross a border?
22.2.2019
Workshop
In this workshop, we will share some of the work and practices that we have developed in the context of the ROPE-series over the last ten years. We will be dealing with the rope as an emblem, as a riddle and a problem, collectively encountering its qualities and dealing with its entanglements. These are some of the questions we will be exploring together: How do you untie a huge knot collectively? What happens with the limits between bodies and objects when dealing with a very long rope? Please bring comfortable clothing.
Farah Saleh:
Archiving Gestures
What does it take to cross a border?
23.2.2019, 3-6pm
Workshop
Farah Saleh will share her ongoing artistic research on the archive of gestures with the art community in Berlin. The workshop will investigate how individuals can contribute to change through exploring social and political memories, using the body as an archive. By re-enacting, transforming and deforming gestures in different creative ways, it will experiment with ways of archiving gestures and personal alternative narratives that are omitted from official narratives.
deufert&plischke:
Knotting Choreographies
What does it take to cross a border?
24.2.2019, 4-5pm
Workshop
choreographic workshop – no registration needed
In the framework of their performative installation spinnen, deufert&plischke invite the audience to take part in a choreographic workshop. Together we will write down some algorithmic rules and transfer them into space by walking and looking at each other. The words keep us together like imaginary threads and make us move not next to but through one another, building collective knots by temporal alliances, stumbling, hesitation or smiles.
deufert&plischke mit Kike García Gil:
spinnen
What does it take to cross a border?
22.2.2019 — 24.2.2019
Performative installation
Friday, 22 February, from 2pm onwards
Saturday, 23 February, from 2pm onwards
Sunday, 24 February, from 3pm onwards
Anne Juren: Plastering the Body
What does it take to cross a border?
23.2.2019, 11am-2pm
Workshop
This workshop will explore different somatic body practices (such as the Feldenkrais method) that choreographer Anne Juren uses in her research on Fantasmical Anatomy in order to explore the relation between body functions, body images, dance and choreography. In this workshop, we will work with the idea of the skin as a boundary-object and surface, and explore the practice of plastering as an artistic strategy to rethink how we experience the body, its contours and its boundaries. Participants are asked to bring comfortable clothes and a towel.
Anne Juren:
The Lesson on the Skin
What does it take to cross a border?
22.2.2019 — 24.2.2019
Performance
Friday, 22 February, 8–9pm
Saturday, 23 February 6.30–7.30pm
Sunday, 24 February, 2–3pm
What does it take to cross a border?
On borders, bodies, and performance
21.2.2019 — 24.2.2019
Performance, Workshop, Talk
The ifa-Galerie Berlin presents a four-day event programme addressing the experience of borders from the perspective of bodies. Through a series of performances, original artistic contributions and workshops, a group of international artists will ask participants to examine how borders are created, engendered and negotiated by physical, choreographic and sensory strategies and processes, but also how we can understand and redefine them through physical experience. The programme will be complemented by talks and conversational formats.
The Lion’s Spring
Talk and discussion with artist Hassan Darsi and Omar Berrada
19.2.2019, 7pm
Talk, Discussion
We cordially invite you to a conversation between artist Hassan Darsi and writer and curator Omar Berrada which is organised in the context of HUDUD, a transdisciplinary art and research programme curated by Driss Ksikes and Omar Berrada.
Hudud
Public presentation
13’53”
Public presentation by workshop participants, moderated by Omar Berrada and Saba Innab
HUDUD (arab. “borders”) is a transdisciplinary art and research programme that brings together young artists, architects and social scientists based in Morocco. HUDUD focuses on mobility beyond mental and territorial borders and takes inspiration from the life and work of the late Fatema Mernissi. A pioneering feminist, she was also a renowned sociologist, a successful novelist and a committed social activist. The programme asks how to think beyond our limitations, and to transgress the symbolic borders between disciplines and methodologies, in order to embrace mobility as a mode of research: the mobility of ideas, memories, imaginaries and forms of representation.
20.2.2019, ifa-Galerie Berlin
HUDUD, an art and research project on (post-) colonial mobilities
19.2.2019, 7pm — 20.2.2019
Workshop, Talk
HUDUD (arab. “borders”) is a transdisciplinary art and research programme that brings together young artists, architects and social scientists based in Morocco.
“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?”
28.1.2019, 7pm
Lecture
Contemporary Art, the Refugee Condition, and the Alibi of Engagement
Talk by Anthony Downey
The talk will be held in English.
Free entry.
Artist Talk with Abdessamad El Montassir
22.11.2018, 7pm
Artist Talk
The event will take place in French and will be consecutively translated into English.
Free entry.
Invisible
Exhibition Opening
11.10.2018, 7 pm
Opening of the exhibition Invisible
With Zainab Andalibe, Kenza Benamour, Hicham Berrada, Mohammed Laouli, Abdessamad El Montassir, Anna Raimondo, Leila Sadel and Anike Joyce Sadiq.
Zainab Andalibe, Kenza Benamour, Hicham Berrada, Mohammed Laouli, Abdessamad El Montassir, Anna Raimondo, Leila Sadel, Anike Joyce Sadiq
“Shake off the chains of too constricted space.
He who has burst from all dimension’s bonds
Ranges through all directions, like the sky.
The rose’s scent by parting from the rose.”
Muhammad Iqbal[1]
Today, the visual sense predominates our ways of imagining the world that surrounds us. Contemporary societies are defined by an incessant flow of images. Social networks dictate the laws of information by producing visual codes by the second, posted in a snap on Instagram or Facebook.
Thus, the unmanifest has been weeded out of the collective imaginaries, and the spiritual dimension has been dismissed from contemporary concerns. By imposing its “universal” codes and standards, the West relegated the unmanifest to the bottom of its heap. However, today’s Western societies show an emerging quest for spirituality and manifold attempts to reintegrate the unmanifest into everyday life.
If we consider examples of contemporary realities on the African continent, the dialogue between spiritual and material dimensions has at times been collisive, but it has never broken off. The current challenge is to inscribe this coexistence in a dynamic continuity without allowing ourselves to be imprisoned in an outdated, traditionalist vision of an (often self-) exoticised Africa. In his essay Reinventing African Modernity, Blondin Cissé suggests an approach of reconnecting to broken heritage: “At stake is no longer the question of imprisoning oneself in the dilemma of oneself and the other, nor whether to embrace the outline of a conquering and alienating Western modernity or not, but to deploy a real strategy of emancipation […].”[2] This strategy unfolds through reappropriating spiritual traditions and interweaving them into contemporary realities, channeling the relation of the visible to the invisible.
Invisible is an invitation to re-learn to perceive beyond the margins of the visible. The presented works offer a dialogue between artistic strategies, each of which integrates unmanifested spiritual dimensions in its own way, by focusing on practices of rituals and myths rooted in everyday life’s material realities.
In collaboration with Le Cube (Rabat), the art and research project Attokoussy – consisting of the artists Leila Sadel, Zainab Andalibe, Mohammed Laouli, and Abdessamad El Montassir – endeavours to open a space of translation and rereading on the subject of rites and superstitions in Morocco.
Artist Anna Raimondo bids us to close our eyes and listen to the sea, a place of passage and a metaphor for encounters between coexisting cultures. Through intimate fictions, her project weaves together daily rituals, dreams, and religious renditions related to the sea and its mysteries.
With her series Reconciliation, Kenza Benamour looks at daily rituals and questions the “spiritual amnesia” of contemporary societies. Her diptych testifies to sacred and profane experiences by revealing the spiritual significance that unites them beyond the cultural constructions that seem to separate them.
Hicham Berrada turns the barely visible movement of a magnetic flower into a surreal experience. The inorganic flowers in Les Fleurs consist of iron particles, which form a magnetic field in a liquid. Berrada considers flowers as metaphors for suffering and perseverance, which multiply without fighting and disappear without complaining. These abilities of the nature that Berrada simulates in his video could also be understood as an anthropological analogy.
With You Never Look at Me From the Place From Which I See You, Anike Joyce Sadiq presents an installation that intertwines different perspectives and that plays with the simultaneity of presence and absence. Sitting on a chair at the centre of the installation and looking at a projection, the single viewer becomes part of the piece and is being observed by other viewers. Thus, the person on the chair cannot perceive the work in its totality – to contemplate the whole work, one must take into account his or her own relation to other viewers and one’s own immersion in the environment.
The exhibition is a reflection on perceptions and visibilities of liberation processes – above all internal; those of an inside struggle – which require constant effort to seek out intuitive knowledge and channel relations to the invisible.
Curated by Alya Sebti
Curatorial Assistant: Nikola Hartl
[1] Mohamed Iqbal: The Mysteries of Selflessness (1918), J. Murray, London, 1953. English translation from the Persian by Arthur J. Arberry.
[2] Blondin Cissé, Réinventer la modernité africaine, in Achille Mbembe & Felwine Sarr (eds.): Écrire l’Afrique-Monde, Paris, Philipe Rey, 2017, p. 149. Author’s own translation from the French.