MaHalla: Protest Lounge and Acts of Defiance

Sep 11, 2024

Protest Lounge – 12 Channel Sound & Textile Installation curated by
Onome Ekeh featuring Ayọ̀ Akínwándé & Holger Schmidhuber

Acts of Defiance – a suite of performances curated by Nahum
11-15 September
Wilhelminenhofstrasse 76/77, Gate 1A, 12459 Berlin

Featuring

Wed., 11. SEP, 9:10 PM On My Way SARINA PANAHIDEH Main Hall – Protest Lounge

Th., 12. SEP, 9:00 PM COBRE CRU ENCARNAÇÃO Main Hall – Protest Lounge

Fr., 13. SEP, 10:00 PM Recuerdos Del Presente SHARON MERCADO NOGALES Main Hall – Protest Lounge

Sa., 14. SEP, 4:30 PM Break On Through To The Other Side MARCO SCHMITT Main Hall – Protest Lounge

Concurrent with the gallery program, AOA;87 will also present two satellite programs at alternative art space, MaHalla. Protest Lounge merges Ayọ̀ Akínwándé’s expansive soundscape “All the World’s Protest”, with Holger Schmidhuber’s tactile poetics, “Carpets of the Forgotten”. It features a technically elaborate immersive12 channel acoustics, with a denser layer of immersion provided by Schmidhuber’s emotive carpets.

“All the World’s Protest” was inspired by 2019, the so-called “Year of Protests”. Akínwándé compiled field recordings of social and political turbulence, and gave them new energy by placing them in live jam sessions with jazz musicians. Schmidhuber’s “Carpets”are similarly re-contextualised: centuries-old woven oriental carpets overlayed with punk articulation in an alchemy of painterly intuition and technical perfection.

Merged together as Protest Lounge, the two works generate an energetic field, an x and y axis of interventions and introspections; a galvanised space of expression, contemplation— and disappearance.

It is this complexity that sets the stage for Acts of defiance, a performance program curated by Berlin-based Mexican artist, Nahum.

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essenceof being.
— Albert Camus, The Rebel

In the spirit of Albert Camus’ studies of human defiance, the performance programme, Acts of Defiance, explores the multifaceted nature of rebellion and its place within the human experience. This programme consists of artists and invites participants to witness a series of performances that embody the essence of resistance, challenge, and transformation. Through performance art, we seek to explore acts of rebellion and their motivations, consequences, and ethical dimensions. This curation interprets rebellion not just as an act of defiance, but as an assertion of human dignity in the face of absurdity of human systems and culture as well as of injustice.

About Nahum

Nahum is an artist, musician, multi-instrumentalist, performer and artistic director who lives and works in Berlin, Germany. His work combines outer space technologies, illusionism, and hypnosis to create alternative and extreme perspectives of human experience.