In conversation with the curator Stefanie Hessler, the performance artist Joan Jonas presents material relating to projects in Cochin, Venice, Madrid, and Japan pertaining to her ongoing project, an archeology of the sea, which developed out of her teaching practice at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Josèfa Ntjam Brings Her Dazzling Aquatic Imaginaries To Rome...
Despite the recognition of human reliance on the World Ocean as a biogeophysical unit, we continue to live in a world of oceanic fragments carrying legacies of past and present imperial processes.
« les lumières affaiblies des étoiles lointaines les lumières à LED des gyrophares se complaisent, lampadaire braise brûle les ailes, sacrifice fou du papillon de lumière, fantôme crépusculaire d’avant la naissance du monde (…)
c’est l’étrange, j’ai dû partir trop longtemps le lointain, mon chez moi est dans mes rêves-noirs c’est l’étrange, des mots étranglés dans la noyade, j’ai hurlé seul dans l’eau, ma fièvre (...)»
« Mon corps, carcasse, se casse casse casse / Mon corps canne à sucre flèche flèche flèche / Mon corps banane est en larme larme larme / Mon corps peau noire, au coucher du soleil, / ne trouve le sommeil / Mon corps plantation poison / Mon corps plantation poison / Mon corps plantation / Demande la rançon / La pluie n’est plus la pluie / La pluie goutte aiguille / La pluie acide pesticide / La pluie infanticide / Mon père vivait près de la rivière / La rivière était à la lisière / Du champ de banane pour paname / Banane rouge poudrière / Sous les tropiques du cancer »
Alexis Pauline Gumbs and adrienne maree on the many ways in which the natural world points the way forward to liberation for all species.
Since early European colonial expansion and imperialism, Indigenous cultures have been subjected to primitivist Eurocentric thought and labelling. Prolific racist actions, such as the scientific exhibits that flooded museums in the wake of colonial exploits, were used to demonstrate our so-called demise as primitive peoples—largely through the display of our cultural objects and dead ancestors’ bodies. These colonial labels, which still proliferate today, were not determined by us and are at the root of deep misinterpretation. Symptomatic of this is the danger that our art creation today can be too easily attached to these historic forms of racism.
"All That Perishes at the Edge of Land" tells the story of poor workers who come from all over Pakistan seeking work demolishing vessels, and their imagined dialogue with the decommissioned container ship they are breaking apart.
What is normal, what is culture and who determines it?