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by Mekhala Dave

Undulating Currents: A Group Show – An Analysis into the Curatorial Process

Water has been a spiritual guide and relational element from my lived experiences. As long as I remember, water has been my gateway to think and reflect about life. Water offers me stillness and remedies. Water serves my higher state of being–– biologically, cognitively and bodily. Swims in water bodies are strokes of joys, nurturing and healing. Sea salt, riverine musk or indigo lake, I float in wild submerges. Water is a part of me and I am a part of water. As the Earth rotates around its axis, the clump of water is blissfully prominent in the starry glitters of the universe. Such is the magnitude and the profound effect of water. As living, sentient beings, we are the land dwellers that are rooted firmly to the ground, who live alongside water. However, our ancestral history is potent with watery worlds that surround us in a magnificent wave of glory. Water connects us all with the Ocean. The rim of the Ocean is known to us, but its mysteries run deep. The stories of the Ocean and its inhabitants are known to us and these stories are compelling in the way that they tease us about the Ocean’s expanse, offering us so much more than we can even begin to imagine. If we begin to think with the Ocean, the Ocean whispers to us about revelations. But how do we relate to the Ocean, and who gets to tell their stories? Who speaks for the Ocean?

With massive outbursts of wars, scarcity of water, overconsumption, population increase, capitalist commodification, resources extraction, negation of multispecies and vulnerable communities, and climate change impacts, one cannot help but think about how one can begin to grasp this magnificent whirlpool of climate change and its impact on the intricacy of the global networks and systems. As I explore my sense of being––inhabiting spaces and own position as a thinker, lawyer, writer, scholar, activist and daughter of the Ocean, through my practice––I have been fortunate to exchange meaningful experiences and conversations with those from the Global South. This includes researchers, artists, legal and policy experts, Indigenous leaders from the Pacific and Caribbean, marine biologists, environmentalists, activists and scholars. I am increasingly concerned with how humanity continues to plunge forward in restless moves, causing damage to the ocean, yet, marvelling at attempts for micro gestures of resistance movements for ocean stewardship. This article unveils from the materiality of ocean’s resources and contemporary art’s trajectory with decolonial strands from theory to praxis in the exhibition Undulating Currents: A Group Show. The exhibition was co-curated by the curator Brooklyn J. Pakathi, myself as an ocean law and policy researcher, with the exhibition designer Maria Rudokova at the University of Applied Arts Vienna at the University gallery Sala Terrena in Vienna that opened in November 2023.

In the October Journal (2009), the scholar Julia Bryan Wilson writes a polemic inquiry about contemporary art that offers “vibrant sense of inclusion, fostering collaborations between historians, scientists, policy makers, activists, and artists, as well as admitting all kinds of objects (canonical, mass-media, and otherwise)”. She further states, “[…] More to the point, contemporary art history, because it is always in formation, necessarily admits its own instabilities, its own fissures and holes, it cannot presume singular meanings, etched in stone as it were.” The scholar Grant Kester writes that contemporary art has “unregulated and multiple claims of interpretative authority”; the art historian Joshua Shannon emphasizes contemporary art that “serves as a function of critique” for “its power to show us where our politics fail”. Departing from foundations of contemporary art discussed among the scholars as part of the October Journal series, is the touchstone of formulations that provide spatial and temporal reflections on sites, networks and modes that traverse across borders, people, multispecies and hybridity of movements. Setting the scene of a global turn in contemporary art in her article, Professor of Global Art History and Art Criticism, Anna Maria Guasch addresses the burgeoning of circularity of spaces, markets, events and exhibitions and communication foreclosing the gap between the local and the global, emphasizing identity through cosmopolitanism, and thus, responding to a globalized order in contemporary art in the recent years.



Daniel Bratheaite-Shirley, Pirating Blackness, 2023.



Minia Biabiany, Musa, 2020. 



Curated books on Black art and history on metallic shelves, alongside short curatorial text within the exhibition space, highlighting the emphasis of the research of the exhibition inspired by the scholar Édouard Glissant. Photo: Maria Belova.

 

Curator Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11, in particular, was instrumental in visiting a postcolonial process from a timely period of the global turn, which created a deliberate balance between them, within what he described as ‘proximities’ and ‘platforms’ by enlarging the spatial and temporal dimension of the exhibition in different localities, trusting a cluster of collaborative curators with overarching themes, concepts and motifs from diverse artistic practices. He raised the powerful statement, “The postcolonial today is a world of proximities. It is a world of nearness, not an elsewhere,” envisioned as a response to the limit and expanse to the global discourse across the range of social, political and economic networks. In other words, he explains globalization within the history of the avant-garde. Further, he emphasized on the exhibition set out to “examine and question”, rather than arrive or form overarching conclusions, and most of all, to speculate on Documenta’s institutional form and parameters independent from institutional support, which Enzewor argues, reveals a history of the avant-garde. He further stated that, “To understand what constitutes avant-garde today, one must begin not in the field of contemporary art but in the field of culture and politics, as well as in the economic field governing all relations that have come under the overwhelming hegemony of capital… If the avant-garde of the past […] anticipated a changing order, that of today is to make impermanence […] the principal order of today’s uncertainties, instability and insecurity.” The  ‘postcolonial’, in interpreting Enwezor, is not just a territorial independence in case of sovereignty with recycles of nationalist imaginaries, but a multi-curious, collective, deliberate critique and responsive approach that earmarks de-territorialization within the territories of knowledge, sites of production, artistic practices, exhibition-making of contemporary art, and thus, the grooming of contemporary art within its absorbed, expanded, interconnected networks.

Furthermore, the art historian T.J. Demos has written extensively on the relationship between politics, art and ecology, drawing from the earlier works of the art historian Timothy Morton’s ”nature and ecology” entanglement. Here, Demos takes it further to undertake the task to “decolonize nature” to mean  “[..] Forms of contemporary art practices are most crucial in their self-reflexivity and commitment to 'postcolonial ethico-political praxis’” as well as the interaction between local activities to global formations in his purview that climate change crisis is a political crisis. Whether the term decolonize or postcolonial is used is a matter of scholarly debate, and there are many discourses for the use of the terms anti-colonial, decolonial or post-colonial among a wide range of scholars. All the terms have their own departures, arrivals and legitimacies for their use, discourse and application. However, the term ‘decolonial’, furthermore, is fleshed from the thinker Walter D. Mignolo who unfolded the etymology of the term ‘de-colonize’ from a geopolitical and ‘border thinking’ context, giving rise to the Third world of power, knowledge and being, in his explanation.

In these considerations, the exhibition Undulating Currents: A Group Show emerged as a labor of love and endeavor between the curator Brooklyn J. Pakathi, exhibition designer Maria Rudokova and myself, that brought thinkers, artists and praxis of the black diaspora to speculate on the materiality of oil and water, two distinct elements and most exploited resources that have dangerous impacts from climate change. Sociologist and Cultural Studies scholar Paul Gilroy’s ‘Black Atlantic’ in the analogy of a ‘slave ship’ and relationship to the ocean, reclaimed the emblematic event of the Slave trade journey across the Atlantic Ocean as a way of a new force to position the Black identity as multifaceted Black bodies and movements across cultures and nations as “micro systems of linguistic and political hybridity”. As a heuristic inquiry, Gilroy saw this movement as “shifting of places” to unpack creolisation, in theory and praxis, within the ‘image of the ship––a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system ias the circulation of ideas and knowledge. Leaping from the scholar Èdouarrd Glissant’s interpretation of the world in a non-linear, archipelagic, and into the abyss in order to terrifyingly embrace uncertainty from journeying the ocean by black bodies as a reference point, the exhibition focused on eight artists from eco-feminist, queer and indigenous practices, namely Tshepiso Morapa, Ava Binta Giallo, Minia Biabiany, Tabita Rezaire, Eric Asamoah, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirely, OzHopé Collective, and Ebun Sodipo. The exhibition was simulated in the color black serving neutrality between the materiality of oil and water and the way in which they interact and emanate in spatial and temporal constructs, undulating from Glissant’s non-linearity resulted in forms of displays at different heights, horizontally as well as off the exhibition walls.

The curatorial methodology had three approaches for a decolonial framework: visual, in-dialogue and commons gathering that ranged from digital and media forms works of contemporary art. Namely these were with Brathwaite-Shirley’s interactive game, Binta Giallo’s elemental sculptural installations, video works by Biabiany, Sodipo and Rezaire, photo montages by Asamoah, and commissioned print and video work from Morapa.  The backdrop of textual cues on the walls served as curatorial methodological reveals, and metallic designs mounted bookshelves to expand on the University library’s book collection on Black art and history between the spatial, works of contemporary art and the audience. From the exhibition and research, the University library’s books that were loaned for the exhibition rose from five to forty and counting; books on black art and history created an expanded access to the otherwise limits of the University’s resources.

In Brathwaite-Shieley’s Pirating Blackness game, by direct participation the audience followed a journey of questions generated from the game to reveal undocumented archives of trans bodies lost at sea, whilst Sodipo’s Celeste differently conjured archives from pop culture and gay club media in times of segregation where she situates her own fluid trans body for contemplation. Morapa’s Selekana and the River God collage print and video work told the story of a little girl in a village in South Africa, in the vernacular, who encounters a river goddess who bequeaths her with gifts, thus, transforming her life, in the colonial era of British and Dutch. And Rezaire’s Deep Down Tidal draws from popular culture, textual, spiritual and humorous transpiring images that recollects the ocean itself as a body of communication of submerged hidden black bodies and colonial infrastructure of fiber optic cables that carries a colonial legacy. Giallo’s Water Surface for an abstract interpretation of water as source draws on elemental soil, ceramics and glass that contain water, whilst OzHopé Collective’s Row glides with performative commentary from canoes and fisherfolk communities in response to oil extractivism in Malawi’s local rivers. Biabiany’s video essay Musa refreshes the narrative on France and Guadeloupe’s relations in monocultures of banana plantation and pesticide controls introduced by France in the region, that infiltrated poison in the water system and effected local communities. Asamoah’s photomontages of his ancestral town in Ghana rejoices his own musings on boyhood reflected in the country’s own historical independence and the local boys coming of age. Each of the works with different conjectures had powerful overlaps in navigating a sense of Black joy, encounters within discomfort, curiosity, subversiveness and pivotal moments that broke down hierarchies in curatorial undertakings, transparency, knowledge sharing and speculation and the gaze of the eye of the viewer.



Curated books on Black art and history on metallic shelves, alongside short curatorial text within the exhibition space, highlighting the emphasis of the research of the exhibition inspired by the scholar Édouard Glissant. Photo: Maria Belova.



Ava Binta Giallo, Water's Skin, 2024), Photo: Maria Belova

 

The audience were invited into the dense space to experience a breakdown in aquatic blackness, encouraging interaction with the works of art, books as conduits of knowledge, four reading sessions from books by black theorists, authors and writers for the general public and BIPOC communities that were complimented by curatorial guided tours.

In a review by Falter, the exhibition was claimed to be a unique engagement for the audience in the city of Vienna. Thus, the exhibition transformed as a vehicle for experiential form to move away from the grand narratives of Western knowledge forms of sharing and exchange to maintain a balance between theory and praxis, ocean law and policy research, cutting through academic and artistic institutional spaces and curatorial decisions, with spatial transformation of the exhibition. From the contemporaneity of place-based responses in the exhibition, relationalities with the non-human and the essence of a spiritual realm emerged, weaving past, present, and future together. It encapsulated a bedrock of social critique from the region that crystallized instances of resistance as a form of discomfort, confrontation, and disruption that attempts to flow towards a collective healing.


Images of Undulating Currents: A Group Show
© image credits Maria Belova

This exhibition was co-conceived with curator Brooklyn J. Pakathi and exhibition designer Maria Rudokova.


Bibliography

Undulating Currents: A Group Show, press release

Foster, Hal, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Grant Kester, James Elkins, Miwon Kwon, Joshua Shannon, Richard Meyer, et al. “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary.’” October 130 (2009): 3–124. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40368571.

Mignolo, Walter. “Geopoitics of Sensing and Knowing. On Decoloniality, border thinking, and epistemic disobedience.” Transversal texts (2011).

Gilroy, Paul, 1956-. The Black Atlantic : Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass. :Harvard University Press, 1993.

Enzewor, Okwui, “The Black Box”. Contemporary Art Biennales – Our Hegemonic Machines in Times of Emergency. On-Curating Journal (2020). Refer to https://www.on-curating.org/issue-46-reader/the-black-box.html

Guasch, Anna Maria, “Globalization and Contemporary Art”. Three Notes. Third Text Journal (online). Refer to http://www.thirdtext.org/three-notes

Sheyerer, Nichole, “Wo sich Wasser und Öl Vermischen”, Falter Zeitung. Refer to https://www.falter.at/zeitung/20231121/wo-sich-wasser-und-oel-vermischen


Mekhala Dave is a lawyer and art academic based in Vienna. She is the ocean law and policy analyst/legal researcher at TBA21–Academy and a doctoral researcher in contemporary art history and theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In her past and current work in legal practice, as well as in her PhD research, she advocates for a social turn in artistic practices and explores encounters located across knowledge spheres and communities in the Global South at the intersection of activism and newly shaping ocean policy. From her lived experiences across borders, she draws inspiration and spiritual guidance from water to the questions of historicity and the search for emerging “new” relations of identity and belonging.


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