Exhibition Catalogue

Oct 09, 2024

The glittering field

This catalog was published on the occasion of the gallery program during Berlin Art Week 2024 and features the exhibition “The Glittering Field” in the gallery, as well as the 12-channel acoustic and textile installation “Protest Lounge,” curated by Onome Ekeh, and the performance series “Acts of Defiance,” curated by Nahum, at MaHalla.

The glittering field

Ha no kage,
Kaze ga wataru,
Hikari no kirameki

(Tree shadows,
Wind passing through,
Glimmering light)

– Bashō

This all started with a glimmering just beyond the scope of peripheral vision. An incessant flitting, seemingly random, then a pattern gingerly at first, then with accelerated persistence begins to construct itself. Emergent fragments of a transmission…
The question persisted, why is it all shimmering? What is this impulse to transmit? Why transmit? To what end, transmission?

I held the thought for a long minute and then encountered an aha! moment with Eduardo Kohn’s book, How Forests Think. In his book, Kohn asserts that what we (humans) share with the sylvan habitat is not just bio-material, but also Mind.If we have eyes to see, and ears to hear transmission is always happening within and across species, perpetual relays of distributed cognition.

To this end The Glittering Field, is an assemblage of artists and thinkers in converging upon these contemplations, these reflexes and reflections of this ubiquitous Mind.

For this exercise, we plot across diasporic vantage points, picking up relay from positions of loss, theft, abduction, immigration, cultural fragmentation, censorship, ritual resuscitation, remix, jerry rigged resonators, imperialist fallout static… The etymologies of tech / text / textiles act as capacitors for ransacking personal and political archives— to piece this transmission together.

PROTEST LOUNGE

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.

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

Featured artists

Ayọ̀ Akínwándé 
Daniela Flores
Arias Phoenix Atala
Eric D. Clark 
Grisha Coleman 
James Hannaham
Marcia Harvey Isaksson
Janusha Kenganathan 
Pallavi Keshri
Ilya Noé
Kettly Noel 
Holger Schmidhuber 
Andreeva Tatyana 
Thy Truong
Sweat Variant

Acts of Defiance

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.

– Nahum

Featured artists

Cru Encarnação
Sharon Mercado Nogales
Sarina Panahideh
Marco Schmitt

€ 15.00 — ISBN 978-3-9826530-1-3