Delay and Encounter and/or Other Proximate Unknowns

The domestic lounge acts as a living archive that holds a range of artefacts–or members–that allow the lounge to operate as a microcosm of the socio-cultural ecosystem of a home. In settler colonial cities, the migrant labour class are typically assigned living spaces that are crowded and only allow for pragmatic household practices. The resultant inability to unpack one’s belongings, accommodate family, or perform rituals of selfhood and community are critical spatial consequences that maintain unsettleable conditions. Despite such spatial sabotage, productions of lounging have come to embody determinations to settle and establish belonging and joy, despite state efforts to ensure temporality, unease, precarity, and non-belonging. The central wall unit acts as the anchor structural member that both demarcates space and provides storage. Through this, lounging as a verb overrides the absence of the lounge as a noun to offer a mise-en-scéne that holds multiple conditions of time–past, present and future–simultaneously.

Luana Vitra’s work is driven by subjective equations of mineral communication. Within these equations, which situate her understanding of the mineral kingdom in parallel with her own existence, she understands iron as black skin, copper as communication and affectivity, and lead as gravity. She has currently produced works devoted to mineral spirits, and ‘Sublimation’ is a gesture of continuity in these investigations that lie between matter and spirit.

Tell The Water What The Clay Kept Secret is ongoing visual research that grapples extensively with the spatial implications of catastrophe. Conceptualised from an ongoing poetics of space-making, the work interrogates sculptural abstraction and various ecologies of inhabiting. In the artistic provocation, Ola Hassanain hones in on an intimate and familiar ‘site of catastrophe’ – her grandmother’s house. This undertaking is done with a certain obstinacy in order to narrativise the ecological dilemmas that foreclose the possibility of inhabitation. Yuma Haram’s house sits amidst the architectonic structures of water control within the Gezira scheme in Sudan, a network of canals of irrigation and slopes also commonly referred to as the breadbasket of the world. In this presentation, the artist both entangles and works with her grandmother’s political aspirations in order to symbolically preserve this intimate structure – embodied in her calls to “watch the cracks” – with fellow women through history who have made audible demands against imperial projects. What does one make of all these floating, fleeting and/or transitory calls against ecological emptying – as the catastrophes continue. How do we amplify, thereby applying actions to the incessant call to keep what matters to us.

An acknowledgement of the skies, the below, the data, the space between and the energy used to transmute – these three pieces share knowledge and visualisations of the quest of a shapeshifting deity. The works explore the journeys the deity takes in order to bring things to life, to transmute energy, to tap into source and to carry knowledge across space. Her quest is grounded yet undefined, she acknowledges the screen, the viewer and most importantly the digital magic that allows her to tap into nature and technology. Her mind is a time-travelling machine which allows her to be both past and present, combining multiple knowledge systems in order to share moments of her quest on screen. She shapeshifts in order to hold the attention of the viewer, aware that attention is something we can no longer hold. She makes her quest known through these visualisations. Through her actions, she reminds us of what it means to look, to be, to hover through space and to search for ourselves within the realms of the physical and digital.

Over 400 years ago Africans were kidnapped, brutalised and marched over vast stretches of land into forts and dungeons. Many died on the way. Later, they were shipped to the Caribbean and the Americas to toil on plantations, mines and in factories. From the European forts and across the Atlantic Ocean to the intended destination, is what’s commonly referred to as the Middle Passage. Nii Noi Nortey’s performance is an attempt to capture the depths, agony, fury and violence of these transatlantic crossings in sound. It employs techniques in improvised music on homemade instruments. There is also an array of conch shells, pipes, chains, strings, voices, drums and bells. The roar of the Atlantic is echoed through vessels and receptacles of blue and red coloured water. This is suggestive of the blood, sweat and tears of the captives, and painfully evokes the long and bitter experiences of that ignoble trade. Through the music, submission is transformed into a pervasive sense of resistance, insurrection, revolt and liberation.

It’s more than a feeling.