Tag: berlin biennale

School of Anxiety // Processes of (Un)learning in Collaborative Art Praxis

“Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”

― Søren Kierkegaard

The School of Anxiety (SoA) is positioned as a collaborative space of (un)learning. Conceptually derived from psychological notions of ‘anxiety’ and references the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s text The Concept of Dread (1844). However, it extends beyond the space of literary and conceptual theory into artistic practice. The project facilitator and Uganda-based curator and writer, Moses Serubiri believes that ‘subjective anxieties’ relate to the societal notion and process of ‘becoming someone’ He writes, “this project is about how to essentially refuse to take on the guilt of becoming a subject: whether this is a civilized, tribalized, politicized, and radicalized subject.”

The first iteration of the SoA took place in Johannesburg during September last year. After an immersive experience of exploring spaces like ROOM gallery, Keleketla! and the Hector Pieterson Memorial Museum, a public panel entitled What to do with anxiety? ensued. It manifested as part of the Berlin Biennale’s public program I’m not who you think I’m not. The project positions itself as a space for (un-)learning, centred on the experience of subjective anxieties and the processes of “becoming”.

Portrait of Nyakallo Maleke by Papa Shabani

His praxis explores “meta-narratives and scholarly practices” – transcending the perceived boundaries of art. It often probes the activation of a network of people, focusing on forming conversation with those engaged in the process. “I think of my work as trying to engage beyond the field of art and with practices and disciplines that challenge our current understanding of art.” The participating artists include Awuor Onyango, Nyakallo Maleke and Sanyu Kiyimba-Kisaka. Their inter-disciplinary approaches span video, sculpture, theatre and poetry.

The second event was hosted in Nairobi last month. The workshop was located in Uhuru Park – often a site for national rituals. Moses describes the dynamic tension between opposition and pressure groups as visible in the proximity to Nyayo House – government buildings and a detention centre, notoriously known as the ‘Nyayo House torture chambers’. In 1992, a group of Kenyan mothers staged a hunger strike to resolve the release of their sons who had been detained as political prisoners and protest for the restoration of democratic practice.

Portrait of Sanyu Kiyimba-Kisaka by Zahara Abdul

This historical event was the foundation for the public performance and second SoA iteration. Moses reflects that, “it was crucial that no-trace of the performance was left, because we were not aiming at re-authoring the actual space, but rather pursue symbolic gestures that would allow us to deepen our dialogue with historic anxiety.”

He describes the synchronicities between each workshop as conceptually tied to an exploration of autopoiesis, mourning, and obsessional doubt, as well as, “becoming immersed into a whole new environment. For both iterations we have spent majority of the time visiting places, going to museums, talking to curators, artists, writers, and cooking and shopping. The project is as much about learning as it is about unlearning.” Not being bound to the pressure of giving art in exchange for some kind of financial remuneration, “we have been able to really have meaningful exchanges that avoid the system of regurgitating and reproducing oneself into a brand of some kind. I think that the SoA members have stepped out of their usual practices to engage other ways of ‘doing’ that have emerged through a conversation.”

A third iteration and extension of SoA will take place in July 2018 during the 10th Berlin Biennale.

8 March 2018
Angel Ho- Energy Without Restraint

In the comic book series The Wicked + The Divine (written by Kieron Gillen, illustrated by Jamie McKelvie) ancient gods return to Earth in the form of modern pop stars. The series wittily bases its super beings on real life icons. Lucifer is a riff on David Bowie, Odin is essentially a member of Daft Punk and so on. The story shows the extent to which the contemporary consciousness is stalked by the fame machine. In the same way that our ancestors projected their hopes, desires and fears onto mythological beings, we worship at the altar of sound and vision. Look at how Michael Jackson and Prince have effectively being deified in death. Under the screens of daily life lies a harsher and brighter world of wild emotion and uncontrollable dreams.

South African musician Angel-Ho is an artist who profoundly understands this collective cultural unconscious, and how to manipulate it for their own ends. Through their recordings, image and performances they conduct the iconography of pop into transgressive realms. A key example is the blistering ‘ I Don’t Want Your Man’, a mutation of a Keyisha Cole sample into the national anthem of dread post-human robot empire.

The Cape Town based producer has become an acclaimed global underground figure over the last year. With their brutal music and assertive non-binary queer image, Angelo Valerio was identified by many publications as making the perfect soundtrack to the tumult of Rhodes and Fees Must Fall. Their musical output is combined with intense live performances. Dancing on glass and a carefree attitude toward pyrotechnics. They is also a founder of the NON Collective, one of most visionary, intense electronic labels out there. NON has also been blowing up this year, with one of their most recent releases being his spiritual allies FAKA’s mind expanding Bottoms Revenge. They share personal visions of glamorous extremism- glitter and tinnitus, gold paint and bloody wounds.

Angelo’s first brush with musical glory occurred at the Manenburg Jazz Club when they was a little kid- ” little did I know the song I loved the most ‘ I love you Daddy’ was going to be performed live by Ricardo Gronewald himself. So he called me on stage, and I had stage fright throughout the whole performance, omg! All I do now is laugh because it was embarrassing, but it was funny because it happened at his gig!” The former child star sadly passed away last year, but as Angel-Ho notes ” he lives on”.

This charming anecdote may almost seem out of place with Angel-Ho’s dystopian and sexualized work. But while they deals with intense subject matter they sees their work as embodying a hard-won optimism. In response to a question about how politics impacts on his practise, they suggested that it’s about keeping positive in dark times. ” There’s no escaping reality and fantasy, they are the same. Of course, what happens around you affects you, and people collectively. With every event that happens globally, we see the repeating of white supremacy and collateral violence which comes out of a desire to maintain power. You see it in South Africa, you see it everywhere in scales. It makes me want to spread good energy and make tracks which counter negativity. What better way to step away from negativity then to let it thrive in itself, like a parasite with no wound to feed on?”

To this end, 2016 has seen them spreading good energy around the world. They recently took on the Performa Biennale in New York, in collaboration with Dope Saint Jude, Vuyo Sotashe, Jackie Manyaapelo and Athi-Patra Ruga. Their forays into the world of High Art also saw them unleash the firestorm of his Red Devil performance on the Berlin Biennale. This performance was inspired by the Kaapse Kloopse festivals- ” Red Devil was a desire to be your complete diva self, in my drag. It had a lot to do with the Red Devil performer who traditionally lead the atjas in procession, and would scare the kids away alongside moffies. Red Devil, in my case, was chasing away fears, in celebration of the things which make people separate from each other. It became an intervention where I performed a re-birth of my feme energy, without restraint, using fire to light the way.”

The performance has the Devil transformed into a character called Gia. The theme of transformation is central to his work more generally “our generation leads by not conforming to gender, race, sexuality… As a performer it became important to tell the narratives which I live day by day, to be fearless”. And with their track record, the secret projects they has lined up for 2017 are bound to be as fearless.

2 December 2016
CUSS Group at the Berlin Biennale; the glitchy underbelly to your interactive parameters

CUSS Group, formed in 2011 by Ravi Govender, Jamal Nxedlana and Zamani Xolo, have been tsatsatsa since the get-go and need little introduction; they were South Africa’s first arts collective to focus on digital technologies and have, since then, gone viral, infiltrating a diversity of spaces; from car boots in Zimbabwe to MoMA in Poland, from internet cafes and hair salons in SA, to gallery and project spaces in Australia, Switzerland and London. They’ve morphed over time to include Lex Trickett and Christopher McMichael and are currently showing at the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art where they brought Philip Pilekjær on board as an extra bansela for the production of their installation titled Triomf Factory Shop.

You check those lexicons? CUSS Group are informal architecture and transgressive neo-archive, constantly subverting the sexy terminology lubed-up by exclusive art institutions. They were ‘post-internet’, ‘super-hybridity’ before white-cubes latched that language… but that savvy can hijack what it wants coz CUSS Group made the gogqa*. Their mass aesthetic has never pandered to the violent atmospheres of those exclusionary spaces. Instead, they throw up rude questions in scandals of contact**; pixelating paranoid, annihilative renderings and frustrating the visions of regulative power. CG are an illicit economy with many usernames; they’re the glitchy underbelly to your interactive parameters, the errant bluescreen to your reductive protocols of modulation… and they’re bringing the noise in Berlin.

Triomf Factory Shop is simulacra in iridescent disk-spin; it’s a swarm of diffused meaning, a passage of intensities and forces, turning the thing in on itself, manipulating the implications of the platform by hiding things in plain-sight. LCD insubordination and the semi-sleazy. Counter-culture’s too limited: it’s an exploit***. But you’ll probably be in-and-out in three seconds, waving your terms. At biennales, people stand in front of things just to say that they did. Cash ‘n carry, but can you smell the contraband? The seedy section and the illicit underhand. What you fronting for? You wanna put that on lay-bye? There could be sliding-doors but that would be too easy-access. You’ll probably take the cabinet for closed, miss the catalogue and the infinity curve, the repurposing of what remains after the bulldozers came and left. There’s history in the artifice and implications in that name; who’s triomf? Do some digging. Who gets to produce and export the images? This is surreptitious transfer; re-appropriated appropriation, co-option in a bad paint job and the resurrection of dead content. The TV’s running clandestine overproduction in a façade of daily routine. Excess in the understocked and the flickering light of uneven acknowledgements. Your ‘modernisms’ were misplaced at the start. Necromedia, narcomedia, publicity, packaging… are you live Tweeting?

We live in liquid evil times; there’s always a conversation behind closed doors, surveillance and (in)security. Can CG talk-back through the insurgent entity of Nguni Arts International? Can borders be disassembled through the cultural institution’s smugglings of works by ANGEL-HO, FAKA, Megan Mace, and NTU? They’ll be projected from the back room beyond the counter of official presentation. Networks and interests- are they superficial? You think CG don’t know the complexities of representation and articulation? Laanie, they’re from SA, so you can keep your flat landscapes and definitions of ‘African contemporary’. You can have a piece… (you got a piece?)… but not of them. You think you can wear this is similar ways? It’s up for sale, so you can try. You got the scent and the seed and the beer and the swag? The economies of veering directions and of having to give up the answers. The traces of long discussions in price allocations and the interfaces between you. The intersection of algorithms. Torn-boxes toppling the finished product. Feedback from multiple micronarratives. You wanna instrumentalise this when you don’t speak the language? CG and the NAI are whistling codes above your warm beds.

Don’t accept it’s unavailable, refresh a thousand times. It gets a bit fuzzy when the URL becomes IRL afterlife, when the young know the wool in advance. What did you expect? This is haptic device and here comes the jingle… you can take it away. Take the aesthetic to town. In-flight entertainment… Did you lose your train of thought? Good, then you’re in. Shesha…

* A ghost key used by car thieves to open and start a car

** Fanon made the observation in ‘A Dying Colonialism’, that once the colonial subjects’ vital capacities are co-opted by that system; “From this point on, the real values of the occupied quickly tend to acquire a clandestine form of existence. In the presence of the occupier, the occupied learns to dissemble, to resort to trickery. To the scandal of military occupation, he opposes a scandal of contact. Every contact between the occupied and the occupier is a falsehood” (1965: 65). This article suggests that something similar could be said for the work of CUSS Group in relation to neo-colonialisms. (Fanon, F. 1965, A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press)

*** Computer viruses “exploit the normal functioning of their host systems to produce more copies of themselves” (Galloway and Thacker 2007: 83). In other words, computer viruses thrive in monopolistic environments because they “take advantage of… standardisation and homogeneity to propagate through the network” (Galloway and Thacker 2007: 84). (Galloway, A. R, and Thacker, E. 2007, ‘The Exploit; A Theory of Networks’, Electronic Mediations, Vol. 21, Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press)

22 June 2016