The year-long programme TRANSITIONS by SAVVY Contemporary, which would begin on 13 September and run until 1 November 2024, understands colonial heritage and decolonization as facts and practices of transition. The third of its four chapters is the research, exhibition and performance project SOCIETY: OR INFINITE REHEARSALS – an invitation to dance through subtle and not so subtle choreographies: drawn, sketched, molded, sewn and embodied. Based on multiple rhythms, histories and movements, these choreographies pulsate through societies intertwined with and affected by colonialism and its continuities.
Image above: Kasia Fudakowski, Raised in Surprise, Lowered in Disbelief, 2016, Installation Stained pine wood, steel, brass, nylon, motor, 140 x 530 x 10cm, Installed at Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA, Prague, Courtesy: the artist, Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA, Prague, and ChertLüdde, Berlin
Focusing on artistic practices that deal with movement and its many possible meanings, this project reflects on dance as a method and offers choreography as a metaphor through which we can reflect on the reciprocal relationship between societies and the bodies that belong to them. The works in the exhibition trace different choreographies – repressive, laborious, constructive, desirable, useless, transgressive, inviting (to name but a few) – as well as the nodes of their intersections and encounters within the social fabric of our worlds. While on the one hand the exhibition highlights the imposed choreographies imposed on most marginalized bodies in any society, it simultaneously traces the lines of emancipatory movement(s) created and performed outside of these dynamics. These include the subtle rituals of everyday life that make it possible not only to survive but also to progress, to grow; the generational and cultural memory stored in the body that connects individuals to the community; the movement of groups rehearsed and improvised through a negotiation of needs and desires. These movements, dances and choreographies are the undercurrents that the project brings to the surface, showing how repeated rehearsals and rehearsals determine and shape the way our bodies move, dance, walk or run, meet, diverge and come together again.
Through a movement-centered perspective, this project directs its gaze to the continuities of German and European colonialism that are expressed today in the West as concerns about “diversity” and multiculturalism, adaptation and integration. The control that former colonial nation states exert over the movement and freedom of movement of people both in the metropolis and in the interconnected communities in the former colonies is an attempt to shape societies according to the dominant hierarchies of racialization, class, gender. In these spaces, our exhibition asserts, another kind of dancing and another kind of moving is possible, which we endlessly try out, day in and day out, and which enables us to feel and find different notions of liberation.
SOCIETY: OR INFINITE REHEARSALS understands dance as a process of thinking and feeling that enables us to recognize and see through the choreographies that fix our societies in the steps and gestures of a colonial, patriarchal, classist and casteist logic. What else can dance, which is always in motion and carries past, present and future within it, teach us? To formulate liberating proposals, we return to the knowledge found in the body(s), to movements that are improvised, rehearsed and learned through an understanding of interdependence, permeability and connection.
The exhibition unfolds through a multitude of movements that lead through the space of SAVVY and invite a physical contemplation of the artworks, which are themselves embodiments of movements. SOCIETY: OR INFINITE REHEARSALS brings together artistic and exploratory practices that find expression in film and photography, textile, concrete and metal sculptures, sound installations and paintings. A series of performances will take place during the exhibition, bringing us closer to ourselves and to each other. We offer visitors various opportunities to rehearse their own movements in the exhibition’s sensorium, creating new dances, connections and meanings.
TEAM
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: Renan Laru-an
CURATION & CONCEPT: Raisa Galofre, Meghna Singh
CURATORIAL ASSISTANCE: Kelly Krugman, Lili Somogyi
PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT: Waylon D’Mello
PRODUCTION TEAM: Nancy Naser Aldeen, Jessie Omamogho, Dušan Rodić
PROJECT MANAGEMENT: Grace Baggot
TOTAL MANAGEMENT: Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, Lema Sikod
COMMUNICATION: Anna Jäger
GRAPHIC DESIGN: Juan Pablo García Sossa
EDITORIAL & TRANSLATION: Anna Jäger
VIDEO & SOUND: Bert Günther
LIGHTING: Shun Perrotta
SAVVY.DOC: Sagal Farah
COLONIAL NEIGHBOURS: Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, Matthew Hansen
WHEN?
Opening: Friday, September 13, 2024 7 pm
With a DJ set by Calamidades Lola at 9 pm
Exhibition dates: Friday, September 13 – Friday, November 1, 2024
Opening hours: Thursday – Sunday, 2 – 7 pm
WHERE?
SAVVY Contemporary
Reinickendorfer Straße 17
13347 Berlin
COSTS?
Free admission
