With Leo Asemota, Virginia Chihota, Jaswant Guzder, Eva Kotatkova and Tracey Rose
Curated by Elena Agudio, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
Co-curated by Kelly Krugman
Madness is not a safe space, not a place to walk in for an elusive diversion. Madness burns. And it doesn’t burn, as the Amazon, only because of governments, of corruption, because of our insane societies and the violent actions of men since centuries. It burns also of its own fire, sometimes combusting everything in it and around it, crumbling the possibility of certainty and comprehension. But amidst smoke and flames, fire also produces light, and in the night it gives us the possibility of seeing through the thickness of the gloom.
The exhibitions ULTRASANITY. On Madness, Sanitation, Antipsychiatry and Resistance challenge Western scientific methods and perspectives on mental health, and question medical (mis)conceptions of psychopathologies by situating them in the context of coloniality, racialisation, objectification, and patriarchal oppression. This project confronts us again with traumas and fears of displacement and contamination. Beyond a romanticisation of madness, we seek to address the heuristic and generative potential of certain forms of delirium. Beyond that we want to grant fundamental significance to community engagement and to spiritual, systemic, intra-generational histories in formulating healing strategies.
Over the course of one year, SAVVY Contemporary collaborated with clinicians, artists, patients, cognitive scientists, scholars and practitioners, interrogating different grammars of violence inscribed in universal therapeutic models and the pharmacologisation of care still practiced today.
Addressing the claustrophobic structures of discipline imposed on us by society and in particular by educational systems, the different works installed at ifa Gallery Berlin deal with the possibility of challenging and dismantling contrivances of control and apparatus of confinement through the poeisis of collective engagement.
Artists ifa Gallery Berlin, Linienstraße 139/140, 10115
Leo Asemota, Virginia Chihota, Jaswant Guzder, Eva Kotatkova and Tracey Rose
13.12.2019–09.02.2020
Artists SAVVY Contemporary, Plantagenstraße 31, 13347 Berlin
John Akomfrah, Ulf Aminde, Yassine Balbzioui, M’Barek Bouhchichi, Virginia Chihota, Larisa Crunțeanu, Alessandra Eramo, Lukas Hofmann, Immy Mali, Teresa Margolles, Nathalie Mazeas, Lavar Munroe, Adjani Okpu-Egbe, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and Javier Tellez
15.12.2019–26.01.2020
A project by SAVVY Contemporary in collaboration with ifa Gallery Berlin, the Association of Neuroesthetics, the Gnaoua Festival (Morocco) and Picha Art Lubumbashi (DRC).
The project is funded by the TURN Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes), the Foundation of Arts Initiative and Association of Neuroesthetics (AoN Berlin).
