An Ongoing-Offcoming Tale comprises abstractions, subversions and poetic ruminations, housed within essays that engage with the lives and practices of over 30 artists. It opens with the question: If only some leaves could speak? And in the journey that follows, we encounter many such possibilities – that leave us asking questions of the boundaries we place around the things we are allowed to think, the knowledge we call knowledge, and the questions we permit ourselves to ask.
How to Die - Inopiné is a performance and a practice. It thinks through, in an embodied manner, the prevailing contemporary moods of ecological grief, cultural panic, and collapse. As a performance in a theater or outdoors, an audience encounters five dancers who are constantly building, unbuilding, and rebuilding. Afterwards, stories are told around a bonfire. As a practice in the studio, school, or street, a group of dancers, artists, writers, and architects meet for a year of residencies between Oslo and Umeå.
Sedje Hémon (1923-2011) dedicated her life to showing the common origin and intersectionality of all arts and sciences, culminating in the development of a theory for the “integration of the arts.”
Imran Mir's (1950-2014) oeuvre can be interpreted as a constant refusal to provide comprehensive elaboration beyond what one experiences. The act of contemplation is a guiding principle to interpreting Imran Mir’s work, an approach that reverberates into a practice that grew out of conversations with a community of artists, activists, poets, relatives, and other thinkers in Karachi.
Abdias Nascimento (1914-2011) was a story-teller whose mediums of expression embraced as many forms as they could, borrowing the paths at hand to communicate ideas and reflect on the urgencies of his time and place.
Hannah Ryggen Triennale 2022 presents artists and works that can varyingly be seen in the light of Hannah Ryggen's legacy (1894–1970). With the anti-monument as a prism, embodied truths are replaced with a multitude of alternatives. In this publication, the curators and invited authorsexplore the dialogues that take place between Hannah Ryggen's tapestries and the contemporary artists's woks in the triennale exhibitions, also mediated through a rich selection of images.
Hannah Ryggen's attitude toward hierarchical constructions is still confrontational Her art invites dynamic readings, at the same time as it punctures fascist ideologies and literally outlasts structures in reinforced concrete. This is the strength and potential of her textile anti-monument.
Things, including artistic objects, are integrated into social and societal contexts. Objects are alive, they vibrate and generate resonance. When they travel, their meanings and values shift. They possess a charge that can change and even disappear.
From his longstanding engagement to “un-mute” colonial sound collections captured during the European colonial period, Satch Hoyt’s practice has been dedicated to intervene those collections and awake their sonicity, releasing phonogram recordings and instruments of different regions in Africa from the museological silence. For Hoyt, the sonic opens a portal to the acoustic mappings of history – testimonies of enslavement, resistance, empowerment and liberation, and also the amalgamations of today and the future.
We are delighted to be able to introduce Lerato Shadi’s first monograph. In her work, it is the marginalized that Shadi puts centre stage, negotiating bodies discriminated against in racist, sexist or classist ways, along with the experiences inscribed in them. Employing different media, Shadi addresses issues of institutional violence, patriarchal and colonial strategies of exclusion and erasure but also highlights resistant subjective narratives.
Re-enchanting the World is a publication accompanying Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s exhibition of the same name, shown in the Polish pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. The exhibit is Mirga-Tas's manifesto on Roma identity and art, drawing inspiration from the Renaissance frescoes of the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara and thus attempting to expand the European iconosphere and history of art with representations of Roma culture.
Imagine something new, like justice is a publication project realised by the 2019–2021 fellows of the Graduate School programme at the Berlin University of the Arts: Yalda Afsah, Salwa Aleryani, Neslihan Arol, Anthony R. Green, Mariam Mekiwi, Rindon Johnson, and R A Walden. The intricacies of building societal, historical, corporeal, and environmental justices today in theory and praxis make the common denominator among their sonic, visual, filmic, theatrical, literal, sculptural, and installation oriented researches. Intersections, collapses, overlaps and resonances among their voices make this publication a unique artist book that questions the agency of imagination in the artistic, discursive and political realms.
Upon what kind of power structures of knowledge and knowing are contemporary art and artistic institutions dependent? Do practitioners in the art field reproduce oppressive Western epistemic paradigms through artistic practices and institutional structures, and if so, is there space for emancipatory ways of knowing? What are the ways that intersectional subjectivities open up new epistemic processes within the artistic field? These are among the questions and considerations that provide a critical lens for the 2019 Rehearsing Hospitalities programme.
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s expanded curatorial practice delineates the space of exhibition making as a space of critical thinking and of experimentation. By proximity, the texts in this anthology, echo each other, resonate with each other, interfere with each other, and present perspectives on the political, poetic, and philosophical potentials of exhibition making, beyond the tight corset of the discipline itself.
Dieses Buch legt eine Auswahl von Worten, Arbeiten und Bildern offen, die es geprägt, angestiftet und verkörpert haben. Es wurde nicht einfach als ein Ausstellungskatalog realisiert, sondern als eine Publikation die einen Rechercheverlauf nachverfolgt, als eine Gelegenheit SAVVYs kuratorischen Vorschlag um eine zusätzliche chorale Perspektive zu erweitern.
This publication unfolds as a collection of words, works, and images that informed, incited, and embodied SAVVY Contemporary’s project Ultrasanity. On Madness, Sanitation, Antipsychiatry, and Resistance, an exhibition and research project on the elasticity of sanity.
We Have Delivered Ourselves from the Tonal — Von, mit, zu, über Julius Eastman ist eine Auswahl von Essays, Libretti, Liedtexten, Erinnerungen, Fotos und persönlichen Anekdoten von Musiker*innen, bildenden Künstler*innen, Forscher*innen und Archivar*innen, die dem Werk und Leben des afroamerikanischen Komponisten, Musikers, Performers und Aktivisten Julius Eastman Ehre erweisen.