Artists: HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?
Exhibition title: NO HUMANS INVOLVED
Curated by: Nana Adusei-Poku, Sienna Shields, Christa Bell, Defne Ayas, Natasha Hoare
Venue: Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Date: May 22 – August 16, 2015
Photography: Cassander Eeftinck-Schattenkerk, images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Witte de With
Witte de With is pleased to host HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, a multi-disciplinary arts collective made up of 45 artists who have lived and worked together, in various iterations, for the past twenty years. The collective consists of visual artists, writers, poets, composers, academics, filmmakers and performers from around the world who collaborate across disciplines and cities. Projects conceived and created by this transnational collective ultimately function as laboratories for investigation, production and discourse.
Members of the collective recided in Rotterdam for two months to produce new work, including video and sculptural installations, printed matter, sonic scapes and film shorts. Many of these installations include algorithmically produced sounds, piezoelectric material interactions and visual material from social media, which are explored in relation to the body. By pushing the notion of technology in conjunction with socio-political questions into the physical, sensorial and hence affective realm the Collective is invested in aesthetically emphasizing what writer Sylvia Wynter called “sociogenic principle”. A concept that can be understood as a result of processes of social conditioning and culturally prescribed “sense of the self”, drawing from the work of the writer and activist Frantz Fanon.
The exhibition will be organized around the central question: “What does it mean to be human in a world which is continually contesting ‘certain’ people’s humanity?” and will explore different modes of perception as forms of aesthetic conceptual protest and disobedience to normative orders.The ‘new default’ position, which the collective aims to initiate, opens up a conversation around the multiplicity of our identities. Is it possible to move outside of aesthetic strategies that art, through ideological and institutional framings, has for a long time been complicit with? Can art subvert and truly free the body outside the peripheries of myth and representation to open up a debate that might lead to an understanding of what it “feels to be human”?
Exhibition Readings
Exhibition readings are offered by experts throughout the summer:
5 June, 2015: Teana Boston-Mammah (Researcher, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences)
3 July, 2015: Samir Bantal (Executive Manager, OMA)
Symposium
Also accompanying the exhibition is the symposium Between Nothingness and Infinity on Tuesday 14 July from 6pm, for more information please click here.
The exhibition is curated by Nana Adusei-Poku (Curatorial Fellow, Witte de With and Research Professor in Cultural Diversity at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences), Sienna Shields and Christa Bell of HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, together with Defne Ayas (Director, Witte de With) and Natasha Hoare (Associate Curator, Witte de With).
Jasmine Murrell, Immortal Uterus, 2014
HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, Good Stock on the Dimension Floor: An Opera (film still), 2014
Dominika Ksel, Nana Adusei-Poku, Christa Bell, and Jasmine Murrell, Shores of the Abyss, 2015
Kyp Malone, Belfry I/O Black KRST IN SPRINGTIME, 2015
Pozsi Kolor, NO NAME IN THE SHEETS, 2015
Sienna Shields, Richie Adomako, and Christa Bell, thewayblackmachine, 2014
Dachi Cole, Self Portraits and Other People, 2015
Jasmine Murrell and assistants, Immortal Uterus, 2015
Candice Williams, Pozsi Kolor, and Dachi Cole, Gap Map, 2015
Tiana Marenah, Exodus, 2015
Yam session with members of HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? on 19 April 2015 at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, photographer Aad Hoogendoorn
Yam session with members of HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? on 19 April 2015 at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, photographer Aad Hoogendoorn
Sienna Shields, Richie Adomako, and Christa Bell, thewayblackmachine, 2014
Performance by members of HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? during the opening of the exhibition NO HUMANS INVOLVED on Thursday 21 May 2015 at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, photographer Aad Hoogendoorn
Performance by members of HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? during the opening of the exhibition NO HUMANS INVOLVED on Thursday 21 May 2015 at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, photographer Aad Hoogendoorn
