The Berlin gallery AOA;87 invites visitors to a Curator’s Tour with Onome Ekeh through the current exhibition The Glittering Field on Saturday, 12 October 2024 at 4 pm. The exhibition explores the nature of ‘transmission’ and dives deep into themes such as call and response, spirit, DNA and the contemplation of the void. Featuring a variety of artists and thinkers utilising text, technology and textiles, the exhibition explores forms of communication between species, cultures and genealogies to uncover the subtle and invisible connections that bind us together.
Image above: Event shot with curator Onome Ekeh during the opening of ‘The Glittering Field’ at AOA;87, Berlin, 2024, Photo: P L ZZO
“This all started with a glimmering just beyond the scope of peripheral vision. An incessant fitting, seemingly random, then a pattern gingerly at frst, then with accelerated persistence begins to construct itself. Emergent fragments of a transmission …
Ha no kage, Kaze ga wataru, Hikari no kirameki
Bashō
(tree shade, wind draught, shimmering light)
The question persisted, why is it all shimmering? What is this impulse to transmit? Why transmit? To what end, transmission?
I held the thought for a long minute and then encountered an aha! moment with Eduardo Kohn’s book, How Forests Think. In his book, Kohn asserts that what we (humans) share with the sylvan habitat is not just bio-material, but also Mind. If we have eyes to see, and ears to hear transmission is always happening within and across species, perpetual relays of distributed cognition.
To this end The Glittering Field, is an assemblage of artists and thinkers in converging upon these contemplations, these refexes and refections of this ubiquitous Mind.
For this exercise, we plot across diasporic vantage points, picking up relay from positions of loss, theft, abduction, immigration, cultural fragmentation, censorship, ritual resuscitation, remix, jerry rigged resonators, imperialist fallout static… The etymologies of tech / text / textiles act as capacitors for ransacking personal and political archives— to piece this transmission together.
We are running on two tracks: an x-axis and a y-axis.
X marks the spot
Let’s imagine the x – factor as the spatially oriented vector that secretes objects in 3D. Tech/text/textiles — quite literally the loom looms large in metaphor and praxis. Practitioners of warp and weft, Marcia Harvey Isaksson and Ilya Noé engage in weaving practices to rework ancestral passage and relay. With translating (geno)type into text(iles), Noé continues her exploration of her genealogies by way of trying to (re)weave her mother’s chromosomes, her Amerindian motherline, and her mitochondrial mutations. Harvey Isaksson’s ensemble of works: Kiruna to Kimberley, I Seek You in My Dreams, Holy One, Witnesses, Stimela, and Big Hole, deploy the alchemy of materials to recall, recover, and relocate the sacred from sites of colonialist extraction.
Janusha Kenganathan also invokes ancestral passage through the manipulation of textiles. The departure of a beloved elder oceans away, locates Moksham as an intimate re-interpretation of Hindu funerary rites. In close cultural kinship, Pallavi Keshri reignites the mystery of utterance with her interactive 47 Days of Devanagari Type. The mystery of utterance is compounded by the mystery of writing, how is it that we transmute sound into sigil into shape into line into meaning?
Daniela Flores Arias Numbers are not Mathematics presents us with the gift of play, inviting us to dive into the experimental invention of alphabet. My own contribution, Glittering Witness, an exercise in speculative genealogy, also utilises an inventory of written characters, in this case technological arcane of ASCII encoding to resurrect the forgotten.
In the satellite installation Protest Lounge, Holger Schmidhuber also performs delicate resurrections on discarded oriental rugs via bold punk poetics. These private anthems couple with Ayọ̀ A kí n w á ndé’s re-scaping of meticulously collected news clips of demonstrations and protests occurring all over the world in 2019, the so-called “Year of Protests” — now reset into live jam sessions.
This ballad of text, tech, and textile is profoundly punctuated by the enigmatic Magnets paintings of Andreeva Tatyana, the daughter of Anna Andreeva, a renowned textile designer of the Soviet era. A trained mathematician, Tatyana Andreeva continues the artistic lineage at the intersection of art, science, and cosmogony. Both mother and daughter skilfully navigated ideological party lines, masking their penchant for expressing cybernetics and the quantum feld. Magnets were part of an experimental project originally commissioned for the Central Tourists House in Moscow in 1974. These complex optical geometrics which boldly asserted the aesthetics of disappearance and the dynamics of reorganisation, were censored at the time, but in the true fux of textile immanence, they precipitate into the present.
The Y-factor
Y has a long tail and two branches
– Nigerian parents’ answer to the question ’Why’?
If our x axis represents space-time, our y axis constitutes time-space, and a subsequent reliquary of time-based artefacts.
There is the notion, accrued across myriad cultures, that when things are extinguished and forgotten, they go extinct. However, we learn from the same source mythologies, of revival: the trumpet may sound, the drumbeat invokes, what is dead might reconstitute and rise.
Stars fame out, but it takes eons before the night sky registers the void— rather we are left with a record of fickering light, a thing that shimmers incessantly, nudging us towards relay, towards a call and response with the cosmic phantoms. This tells us that when the materiality of things fray, even when the signal is disrupted or decayed, at the very least we are left with gesture. A gesture that might register as an impulse for sound, the sonic acting frst as a portal, then fanning out into an environment for reconstruction. Thus (for our purposes) the y-axis answers its questions within the audio visual spectrum.
Eric D. Clark sets about a reworking of queer African American poet, Essex Hemphill’s classic poem In the Life, embedding it in invisible house music frequencies, and expanding its sphere of experience by paying tribute to the Gully Queens of Kingston, Jamaica and thus reenergising the text with a freshness all his own. With گاي بنعناع gay bi na3na3 Phoenix Atala plies the sonic wizard craft of beats, samples, and MCing to explore North African temporality, and collapse three generations of his familial lineage of artists in the speculative aural re-imagining of his grandfather’s
Marrakech café in the 50s. In Fric? James Hannaham doubles down on the identity quest as a questioning robot voice, fashioned after “a Black American” voice, attempts to utter its origins.
Thy Truong’s siren like installation, fish scales grow feathers, derives from the archetypal to wield aural landscapes as intensive inquiry into diasporic identity.
Grisha Coleman’s Movement Undercommons precisely charts (with computational aids) the poetics of gestural traits passed down and transmitted through generations and over long migratory distances. Also featured are excerpts from Coleman’s echo::system, a long term engagement of a performance piece played out over two decades through “action stations” fashioned after reimagined ecological habitats, replete with specifc mythologies. In turn /return, Sweat Variant (Okwui Okpakwasili & Peter Born) continues Okpokwasili’s research into the role of ritual in entangling past / future generations. Mirelabais, A Personal History is Kettly Noël’s oral recollection of her coming of age in a Haitian province. Glittering Witness, a video companion piece to ascii generated digital prints, is an invocation speculative ancestors, particularly the outliers who would in their time be obliterated in in life as they are in death
As such, The Glittering Field is an exuberant collision derby of time signatures and modalities; a confuence of incessant shimmer and excitable static. Our rudimentary graph points of x and y axes potentially yields manifold dimensions, emergent zones in rise and collapse with the machinations of Mind. An always evolving ecosystem, a dynamic environment of ephemeral witness and capture.”
Text: Onome Ekeh
About Onome Ekeh
Born and raised on both sides of the Atlantic, Onome Ekeh started out as a painter, transitioned to design, fell in love with cinema, and somewhere in the collusion, went digital. Along the way she picked up an AI habit. A veteran of the New York downtown scene, she presides over a diverse body of work that encompasses film, video, theater, literature, and radio.
She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation Fellowship, a Turbulence Media Award, and the Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen Fellowship. She has recently exhibited at the House of Electronic Arts Basel (HEK); is featured in the upcoming Serpentine Gallery publication, The Shape of the Circle in the Mind of a Fish, and will open a solo show at the Museo Modern in Buenos Aires this November. OE currently lectures at the Basel Academy of Art & Design in Switzerland.
WHEN?
Saturday, 12 October 2024, 4 – 5 pm
WHERE?
AOA;87
Sophienstraße 5
10178 Berlin
