projects

beyond language


a series of exhibitions, performances, lectures and workshops curated by Eva Seufert and Fouad Asfour in collaboration with the Dead Revolutionaries Club (DRC) Johannesburg as an exchange between South Africa and Germany.


please see the detailed documentation here (pdf).

Participating artists and curators:
from the DRC: Fouad Asfour, Khwezi Gule (Hector Pieterson Museum, Soweto), Bandile Gumbi, Amos Letsoalo (Polokwane Art Museum), Sharlene Khan
from Berlin: Eva Seufert and Ingo Gerken
and the Joburg based artsists Alexandra Ross and Claudia Shneider

Venues:
jozi art:lab, Arts on Main, Johannesburg
Drill Hall, Johannesburg
Hector Pieterson Museum; Soweto
Polokwane Art Museum, Polokwane/Limpopo
after the butcher, Berlin



 The project involves participants in reflections on various dimensions of language and communication through dialogue, the creation of works, performances, or interventions. It aims at developing ways of engaging with an audience and stirring its curiosity, for instance in discursive events, workshops or book launches, thus shaping situations where the performative, enunciative and poetic facility of language interact and open up new spaces of creating art. The way how the project goes about doing this is being developed in the course of its progress.
Language is at the centre of human experiences and practises. While language is the basic means of human interaction – through the use of speech in communication – it also is the basis for individual experiences. Language as means of exchange is thus located in both the private and public realm and a mediator between the internal and external; between ideas, expectations and action taken, thus playing a pivotal role when bodies are set in movement.
The project aims at opening up questions such as: How is the language of emotions, of needs and desires turned into phrases? How does experience dislocate meaning across the body, transgressing and deviating from familiar paths, thus changing any unfolding chain? The project aims to study the movement that occurs between present awareness, memory and imagination, the moment before a word transmutes and becomes a name, the process how phrases gather familiarity and gain subjective significance, when expressions change from description to meaning as they are submitted to the subconsciousness.

Apart from these reflections, the project addresses the relation between text and image, the translatability of verbal and visual perception and how this relation influences the reappearance of the repressed which eludes verbalisation in images. Based on a work-in-progress approach, the project invites participating artists to elicit a wide range of aspects and questions while working in the different phases and places of the project. Allowing for an open and process-oriented format, artists are asked to find out how to approach and negotiate these issues not only in exhibitions of their works but also in conversation events and workshops.

„beyond language“ is supported by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen IfA and the Berlin Senate Cultural Affairs Department.

 


                                          around Arts on Main, Johannesburg

                                



                                          Hector Pieterson Museum, Soweto


                                 


                                          Keleketla! Library - Drill Hall, Johannesburg
                               

                                           Polokwane Art Museum, Polokwane/Limpopo





after the butcher, Ausstellungsraum für zeitgenössische Kunst und soziale Fragen, Berlin

It's all Chinese to me - 
how abstract can one be?
18 June - 7 August 2011







Break Through to Grey Room  - Casabarata

Kasbah Museum Tangier

9 february - 19 march 2007

Marten Frerichs
Klaus Jörres
Ulrike Kuschel
Martin Neumaier
Thomas Seidemann
Eva Seufert
Stefanie Seufert
Wawrzyniec Tokarski
Maja Weyermann
Eva-Maria Wilde
Alexander Wolff
Haegue Yang

curated by Eva Seufert and Eva Maria Wilde