A leap – and a void. An augur imagines the future, finding inspiration in the unpredictable gestures of flight. In Steffani Jemison’s expansive exhibition, conditions of endurance and escape are linked in a continuous installation of sound, sculpture, drawing, and video.
The idea of moving within conditions of constraint strongly informs the practice of Steffani Jemison. Fugitivity has been a recurring concern in her visual and textual work, where flight does not appear as physical escape, but as a shifting condition of language, body, and thought. “[W]hat it is to flee and what it is to stay are entangled with what it is to fight”.[1] The point of departure for her solo exhibition in Münster is the ‘language of the birds’, a concept found across spiritual, mystical, and literary traditions that describes a divine and perfect language accessible only to the initiated. What begins as a symbolic figure gradually unfolds into method – a way of listening for meanings and gestures that remain volatile.
The exhibition’s title, for instance, invokes the ancient practice of reading meaning through the calls and trajectories of birds – forms of interpretation grounded in opacity and signs that elude (human) legibility. In resonance with Steven Feld’s research on birdsong, voice, and ritual, the artist interrogates sound as a way of knowing and inhabiting the world. Bird calls emerge not simply as natural signals, but as sonic forms echoing human voices.[2]
This attention to forms of communication and movement is closely linked to the artist’s engagement with hostile architecture. Through the inversion of mechanisms of deterrence and control – such as anti-bird spikes or bird-repelling devices – her work refunctions instruments of exclusion as tools for navigation. That which is carried as a burden might not be resolved but allowed to inhabit and utilise space differently. Conceived as a choreographic structure, the exhibition itself mirrors that dynamic, proposing a spatial arrangement that simultaneously restricts and demands mobility.
Augur is Steffani Jemison’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. It is accompanied by a comprehensive public programme including workshops, readings, and screenings. The exhibition marks the second project within the Kunstverein’s year-long research, exhibition, and discourse programme The Puzzle’s Pulled Apart.
[1] Fred Moten, interview by Emmanuel Olunkwa, November Magazine, November 2025 https://www.novembermag.com/content/fred-moten/ [accessed 14 May 2026].
[2] See Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, 3rd edn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
