PROTEST LOUNGE

Sep 20, 2024

…Sitting on the carpet, somewhat overwhelmed by all the impressions, questions arise: What exactly is a Protest Lounge, and how do these two terms come together? And: What is this really about? Perhaps it’s precisely about this incompatibility, about the distance experienced by those born into social and geographical privilege.

Ekeh’s work can be understood as an immersive experiment that highlights how different events compete for our attention, and how fleeting that attention is—regardless of the importance of the cause.

Ferial Nadja Karrasch – Monopol Magazin für Kunst und Leben

During Berlin Art Week, alongside the gallery program, AOA;87 presented two satellite programs at the alternative art space MaHalla. Protest Lounge, curated by Onome Ekeh, merged Ayọ̀ Akínwándé’s expansive soundscape All the World’s Protest with Holger Schmidhuber’s tactile poetics Carpets of the Forgotten. The program featured a technically elaborate 12-channel acoustic setup, with a deeper layer of immersion provided by Schmidhuber’s emotive carpets.

Protest Lounge

The installation combines the intimacy of Holger Schmidhuber’s Carpets of the Forgotten with Ayọ̀ Akínwándé’s re-scaping of meticulously collected news clips of demonstrations and protests occurring all over the world in 2019, the so-called “Year of Protests” — which were set to music in live jam sessions. This result, All The World’s Protests, is part of Ayo’s ongoing “Archive of the Future”, a series inspired by the sociological layers of political engagement— both public and private dimensions.
It is the private dimensions that dialogue with Holger’s repurposed oriental rugs. Carpets are the ontological repository of centuries of fantasy. Their default mode is transport: either by gifting us verdant landscapes by way of tapestry, or the opportunity to lose oneself in lush texture. These delicate resurrections via bold punk poetics performed on discarded rugs, now instruct us: “LOSE EVERYTHING”, “TELL ME WHY” “LET’S DESTROY IT!”. These are soft revolts, internal prompts that transform the public space spectacle around us into interior landscapes.

– Onome Ekeh