Artists: Ava Binta Giallo, Markus Zimmermann
Exhibition title: Rest in Soil, in Water, in Waithood
Curated by: Ana Raquel Machava
Venue: basis, Frankfurt, Germany
Date: September 7 – November 10, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and basis, Frankfurt
WAITHOOD Magazine and basis e.V. are proud to announce the opening of Rest in Soil, in Water, in Waithood, a new exhibition that aims to present WAITHOOD magazine‘s inaugural issue themed around the idea of rest as an important aspect for the contemporary Black experience in the world.
The first issue of WAITHOOD results from a collaboration between 14 artists, writers, thinkers and makers from various parts of the African continent and its diaspora, who mobilise and share their gifts with the world through their engagement with contemporary arts, the urban built environment and the conditions of having to exist in the world as a racialized subject, aware of the precarity the world offers to black and brown art workers. Therefore, the magazine presents new avenues through which Black artists, writers and makers imagine futures otherwise, platforming how they do the required labour to muster a real, living and ever-present black vernacular which is ancient, young, queer and on the move!
To celebrate this groundbreaking publication, WAITHOOD invites artists Ava Binta Giallo and Markus Zimmermann to temporarily transform the exhibition space into a site of gathering, rest and dreaming access to liberated futures.
Giallo and Zimmermann‘s intervention propose a rearrangement of known materials, creating new choreographies that opens new possibilities of existing and thinking for both the building and the audience, challenging conventional architectural boundaries by establishing a dialogue with the basis e. V. building.
Their intervention tests how architecture can function as a vehicle of ideas, al-lowing the exhibition to initiate a series of conversations with the building. This possibility leads the audience to experience how Blackness (here manifested through the physical intervention from the part of the agency of black artists) can engage with architecture‘s authority, by reimagining the „outside“ beyond architecture‘s power of determining what is inside and what remains outside. The artist‘s intervention in both the backyard garden and in the gallery space, ques-tions whether one can be in multiple spaces at the same time.
Another possibility the installation offers, is to exhibit WAITHOOD magazine‘s in-augural issue within an environment that enables different forms of engagement with its unbonded printed pages, whether vertically, when displayed as a single suspended object, or horizontally, through Zimmermann‘s proposal of sitting and reading that allows the reader to tear the magazine pages apart and propose a new order.
Further, through Giallo‘s choice of materials, the exhibition enables the audience to engage with the classic elements of earth and water, that render the insistence on „rest“ pushed forward by the magazine‘s contributors of the first issue, and the question of „movement“ as a central theme for the upcoming second issue.
