Berlin Art Week 2024: Protest Lounge & Acts of Defiance – AOA;87 @MaHalla | 11.09.-15.09.2024

From 11 to 15 September 2024, AOA;87 will be showing “Protest Lounge”, a 12-channel sound and textile installation curated by Onome Ekeh, and “Acts of Defiance”, a suite of performances curated by Nahum, at MaHalla.

Image above: Portrait of Sharon Mercado Nogales, © Feyd Angeles

Parallel to the gallery programme, AOA;87 is presenting two satellite programmes in the alternative art space MaHalla. Protest Lounge combines Ayọ̀ Akínwándé’s expansive soundscape “All the World’s Protest” with Holger Schmidhuber’s tactile poetry “Carpets of the Forgotten”.

The result is a technically sophisticated immersive 12-channel acoustic whose dense layer is further enhanced by Schmidhuber’s emotional carpets. “All the World’s Protest” was inspired by 2019, the so-called “Year of Protests”.

Akínwándé collected field recordings of social and political unrest and energised them through live jam sessions with jazz musicians. Schmidhuber’s “Carpets” are similarly re-contextualised: Centuries-old oriental carpets, overlaid with punk accents, in an alchemy of painterly intuition and technical perfection.

Fused into the Protest Lounge, the two works create an energetic field, an x- and y-axis of interventions and introspections; a galvanised space of expression, contemplation and disappearance. This complexity forms the stage for Acts of Defiance, a performance programme curated by the Berlin-based Mexican artist Nahum.

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.

About Nahum
Nahum is an artist, musician, multi-instrumentalist, performer and artistic director who lives and works in Berlin, Germany. His work combines outer space technologies, illusionism, and hypnosis to create alternative and extreme perspectives of human experience.

WHEN?

Exhibtion dates: Wednesday, 11. September until Sunday, 15. September 2024

WHERE?

MaHalla
Wilhelminenhofstraße 76/77
Tor 1A
12459 Berlin