Curating
THE DREAM KEEPER: CECILIA GERMAIN
Botkyrka Konsthall, Sweden (Mar – Aug 2021)
This exhibition draws on a long history of Black radical thought and practice, in order to produce a multidimensional space for “borderless being”. It features a newly commissioned body of works about sleep and its many functions: as a health practice, a political stance against unfair power structures, and as a gateway to access other realms within.
In a series of photos under the collective title Rest and Recovery / Silent Resistance, Cecilia Germain invites us to enter the sleep-world, not as a passive escape, but as a mode of activism and survival technique for combatting the effects of ongoing racialised trauma, in the world, and here in Sweden. Sleep and dreaming are proposed as liminal and borderless experiences that provide access to ancestral wisdom, as well as intuition and other dimensions of meaning. Responding to growing planetary and social uncertainties, Germain’s work explores the possibilities for using artistic practices as both medium and methodology for different modes of healing, as well as imagining alternative futures.
View: “Blood, Earth, Water”, a deep dive conversation between artist and curator
_______
Center for Art on Migration Politics - CAMP
Copenhagen (Oct – Dec 2019)
What is happening at the thresholds of migration experiences? Where is the place of belonging? When and how will things change?
Threshold(s)
was a group exhibition, that explores experiences of displacement and exile by considering how people and their memories “crossover” and then inhabit land, culture, identities, structures, and even language. We engaged with current immigration tensions and structural practices, but with a particular focus on the “inbetweenness” of movement as a state of being, which produces critical knowledge. The artists represented in Threshold(s) all have layered practices, including deep memory work as well as participatory and performative elements. Situated in Nordic countries, they confront the geopolitical bordering impulse poetically, by exploring tipping points in their personal biographies that converge with wider political and historical contexts. Through them the threshold emerges as a ‘third place’, a site of/for transgression, a turning point, a leap, an ending, a beginning.
Threshold(s) featured the work of:
Pia Arke, Michelle Eistrup, Yong Sun Gullach, Luanda Carneiro Jacoel, and
Saba Bereket Persson.
Threshold(s) was the third exhibition in CAMP’s new 2-year exhibition program "State of Integration: Artistic analyses of the challenges of coexistence". It was supported by The Obel Family Foundation, William Demant Foundation, Grosserer L.F. Foghts Fond, and The Danish Arts Foundation. The exhibition guide program was supported by The European Cultural Foundation.
DOWNLOAD exhibition catalogue here
_______
WHAT LIES UNSPOKEN: SOUNDING THE COLONIAL ARCHIVE
Statens Museum for Kunst (06 May 2017 – 30 December 2017)
Royal Danish Library (19 May 2017 – 19 February 2018)
What Lies Unspoken
was a participatory sound intervention developed in collaboration collaboration with the Royal Library of Denmark and Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK), as part of my research at the Living Archives Research Project. This intervention was a response to the silences and discomfort surrounding colonial history in Danish museums and public debate. It used artefacts currently housed in both collections to facilitate dialogue about colonialism and its cultural legacies. The process began with a series of intimate workshops with artists, activists, scholars, curators and high school students. Here, we recorded conversations in front of a selection of artefacts. All the voices gathered were edited into soundtracks that provided alternative perspectives on colonial imagery, and also expressed how this history still affects people emotionally.
What Lies Unspoken was funded by the Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces and the Nordea Foundation as part of the Historier om Danmark project.
MILK & HONEY
Botkyrka Konsthall, Tumba, Sweden (25 January – 19 February 2017)
Milk & Honey was a situated, mixed-media installation that explored how local heritage archives could activate global crosscurrents, through themes of memory, identity and belonging.
The focus of the installation was a photograph representing the performance artist Josephine Baker (1906-1975) milking cows at the farm Hamra Gård (Botkyrka municipality), in 1957. This archival document presented an alternative view of this well known Black personality, whilst raising questions about openness and inclusion in Sweden historically
.The installation comprised mixed media components: photography, video, and sound, in combination with physical artefacts. The sonic component was a recorded conversation I had with media and communications scholar Dr Ylva Habel.
Milk & Honey
was a research-based intervention produced as part of Residence Botkyrka’s programme ”Developing Nordic Cities” supported by Nordic Culture Point. It featured in the Övergångar / Transitions New Biennial for Art & Architecture.
VIEW EXHIBITION DOCUMENTATION VIDEO HERE:
https://vimeo.com/20175382
_______
POSSESSION: ART, POWER & BLACK WOMANHOOD
New Shelter Plan, Copenhagen, Denmark (06 June – 05 July 2014)
This exhibition showcased the work of 12 international Black women artists, whose work explores multiple concepts of being and belonging. Through deeply personal expressions these artists reflect on Black womanhood as a dynamic archive of knowledge, formed of flesh, spirit and memory. In mixed media practices and against the backdrop of their own biographies, they offer rare and beautiful insights into what it means to travel with this identity through public and private spaces, to dare to speak where voices are often subdued or silenced, and to honour ancestral inheritances as creators of art. Whilst clearly confronting the enduring legacies of slavery and colonialism experienced in their own lives, these artists also poetically demonstrate the healing and transformative power of sharing ones own story with a community of witnesses.
This exhibition was generously funded by The Danish Arts Foundation and Copenhagen City Council. Artist participation in the project was also supported by the following agencies: FRAME Finland for the inclusion of Sasha Huber, the Mondriaan Fund for the inclusion and production of works by Patricia Kaersenhout and the Danish Arts Council for the production of works by Michelle Eistrup.
_______
A VISIBLE DIFFERENCE: SKIN, RACE & IDENTITY, 1720 – 1820
Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons, London (03 July – 21 December 2007)
What do we see when we look at one another? What aspects of a person help us decide who they are? What assumptions do we make about identities based on colour and body image? This exhibition was about visible differences. It explored the representations of African children and adults living with rare skin pigmentation conditions in the 18th and early 19th centuries. It uncovered their stories, looked at how their conditions were interpreted and the ways in which they were described and displayed.
Approaches to skin and body differences in the 18th century were varied. The medical community attempted to categorise people as specimens – examples of how human beings had deviated from what was considered normal. For the public, curiosity about body difference became a form of entertaining spectacle. People went to fairs and shows to view giants, dwarves, overweight people, spotted children and people with albinism, all of whom were considered wonders of nature.
How much of this has changed? Are we as curious about visible differences now as people were then? What is it like to live with similar conditions today? Through the stories presented in the exhibition we began to explore these challenging concepts, and to make connections with our own experiences of living with a visible difference.
This exhibition was generously funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and John Lyons Charity.
View project legacy website: https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums-and-archives/hunterian-museum/past-exhibitions/exhibiting-difference/