| BLUE GOLD SOFT SPHERES |
| A CONSTANT SOUND CARPET |
| Ìsàlè Èkó - The message never sees the light of day, but is understood A shallow grave was dug for the recording instruments to lie in. Dirt heaped on top, the dirt blocked out the sunlight, the sound of beneath grows louder. Submerged, shards of lighter higher sounds filtering through the topsoil like young stalks breaking through the soil seeking the face of the sun to grow. Life and death. The intensity of the pressure of being underground is then compounded by layering the sub harmonics of the composition with some tube valve warmth to emulate the heat of the earth, All the energy lies in the sub, the reach of a sub harmonic wavelength is long, the message is carried further underground, like a network of tree roots. The message never see the light of day, but is understood. by Leke "CHiFY" Awoayinka |
| UNDERWATER ECONOMY |
| CULTIVATING AUTONOMY |
| A world where violence, foreign domination and profit prevail and our relationship to the earth, or how it is used and abused, is seen by the artist as synonymous with how bodies and their emotional “landscapes” are dealt with. The more resources, including copper—without which our contemporary digital world is inconceivable—are mined, the more the search for or connection to inner resources seems relevant. These various themes and their associated stories are not necessarily addressed directly in the exhibition or reproduced. Rather, they are kept present through the materials enlisted, by relating to their origin, their use, their historical relevance, their development and the trade routes that have shaped our society very physically over time. The artist creates a space, in a certain sense a “third space”, in which a larger spectrum of stories and their complex interrelations with matter, material and their transformation and relationship to people can be experienced, and other perspectives made possible. From the materials and plants that are addressed, she extracts, in a way, the essence of their inherent energies and logics, makes them physically perceptible and thus ultimately also calls upon their nourishing properties. Text by Nikola Dietrich |
| INSTEAD OF LONGING |
| MARKET |
| SUSNNE WENGER DIARIES |
| MEMOIRES OF A SEER: VORWÄRTS-ERINNERN, 2020 Composition and voice by Jumoke Adeyanju aka mokeyanju, 9:15min Poetry (German Original): Susanne Wenger Poetry (English / Yorùbá Original): Jumoke Adeyanju Sample von: Jack Mensah |
| A PERSONAL AFFAIR. DIGGING TO REMEMBER FORWARD. PART TWO. As in the Lagos Biennale installation, the work deals with the history of the Union Trading Company (UTC) that was established in 1928, and has it’s roots in the Basler Mission, which has been operating since 1854 in Ghana. The UTC was one of the most important colonial trading companies of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the beginning the company exported cocoa, palm oil and cotton. Later on they traded in vehicles, textiles, tools, machinery, and much more. It also ran large, elegant department stores in Accra and Lagos and its Swiss staff imported and disseminated know-how. This piece is the second chapter of the installation. It was specially developed for the Swiss Art Awards competition that took place in the fair hall 3 in Basel. This hall was built in the 1934 and hosted the first trade fairs in Switzerland. All the elements used for the installation belonged once to the UTC. The preoccupation with the company is a personal affair in the regard, that they traded also with Oris watches, a former family business. |
| LAGOS BIENNALE |
| In this exhibition Dunja Herzog explored the notion of living in a world that we do not fully understand, where things are lost in translation and we experience our own vulnerability. Herzog likes to create environments made of everyday junk. Sometimes they are the home landscape of some indefinable entities whose nature and function remain unclear. Climbing and trailing vines and the flickering of disco LED lights create a sensorial energising vibe at 1646. This world breathes the atmosphere of the bustling jungle combined with the rubbish of the urban environment, familiar and strange, like a parallel world with a logic of its own. The invitation to participate in Attempts to Read the World (Differently) offered an opportunity for Dunja Herzog to connect to the work of the Austrian born artist and Yoruba priestess Susanne Wenger (1915-2009). Wenger devoted most of her life to the preservation, revival, and promotion of the cultural heritage of the Yoruba culture in Nigeria. She worked together with other artists on the restoration of Yoruba shrines in the forest groves where the shrines, nature and her own sculptures all became part of this sacred environment. The fusion of art and religion is at the core ofWenger’s art and she saw it as her purpose to protect the sacredness of nature. Still using a modernist mode of art construction for her reinventions in Yoruba tradition, Wenger merged her holistic worldview into her ‘archisculpture’, which she no longer regarded as autonomous sculpture but as a translation of the messages of the Yoruba deities. For Dunja Herzog, Wenger functions as a mediator offering a different perspective through which to read global developments and the history of art. Wenger offers Herzog a way out of thinking in binary oppositions of self and other, opting for the contagious travel of ideas and thoughts, and accepting that what is lost and gained in translation. |
| UNLEASHED GHOSTS |
| IT'S BETTER TO STAY ANGRY |
| The recognizable every day objects are bringing the reality of things into the exhibition space. They are carrying little stories of their, from human defined, functions and give the impression to be animated or placeholders of our world. In their fragility there is an insecurity that seems not only to be physical but also emotional. The balance, in wich they are held, threatens to get lost anytime. |
| It belongs to us a little less than we belong to it |
| The Industrial age and modern life concentrated in cities have brought a surplus production of objects in their wake. We are surrounded and swamped with objects, tools, prostheses, more than in any other time in history. Functional objects, everyday objects, disposable things. What is the value of all this for contemporary occidental society? What are the true functions of these things? What needs do they satisfy? How do they influence our everyday life? After a research that has led her to cross various cultures from the African Continent for many years, Dunja Herzog plunges back into the occidental world, assuming the viewpoint of things. She reassembles materials, mostly found by the wayside and in domestic places, and like a modern teller of fables she grants them a new existence. This exhibition is a world of creatures that we could define as hybrids – for lack of a more precise word – apparently fragile, without definite purpose, maybe useless, with no fixed abode and made of the refuse of our everyday existence. If anyone is willing to pay attention, they can come to life, and also speak. Usually, as in the case of Kafka’s Odradek, the conversation ends in laughter – but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves. Will anyone point out that the emperor has no clothes? Text by Salvatore Lacagnina |
| LAUGHTER IS USUALLY THE END OF THE CONVERSATION |
| THE MASTER‘S TOOL WILL NEVER DISMANTLE THE MASTER‘S HOUSE |
| The work REGARDING PAIN unites a collection of titles from Goyas Los Desastres de la Guerra from 1810–20 with the title of one of the most important theoretical standard works about war photography, Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag. The 36-part series is explored through two overlapping printed coinages. The empty space symbolizes the smallest size of a photograph (9 × 13 cm) and the other shows the quotations of the titles. Text by Sabine Schaschel |
| That cannot be seen What madness! He deserved it All is in confusion Against the common good Thruth died Charity They do not want to They don’t know the way Barbarians! With reason, or without And it can’t be helped There is no more time Why? No one knows why This is what you were born for This is bad They are still of use Vain laments Of no use to cry The worst is to beg I saw it Cruel misery! The same elsewhere So much and even more Will she rise again? Strange devotion! Of what use is a cup? This is the worst They avail themselves They do not agree The cats pantomime And they are wild beasts The consequences Horrible Monster! Nothing. We shall see |
