IMAGES 16 | ACTS 16 - An Age of Our Own Making - Reflection II

Ali Al-Fatlawi feat. Wathiq Al-Ameri
Aman Mojadidi *
Amy Lee Sanford 
Athi Patra Ruga  
Bernard Akoi-Jackson 
Harold Offeh 
Michéle Magema
Moe Satt 
Mwangi Hutter *
Nathalie Mba Bikoro 

* Only performs at Roskilde Festival

Ali Al-Fatlawi feat. Wathiq Al-Ameri

we have thought about you

Performance
Sunday June 26 - Court yard, Museum of Contemporary Art

Ali A-Fatlawi and Wathiq Al-Amer are an artist duo. Their performances reflect and challenge concrete prejudice of arab culture, the fear and expectations of dreads involving civil casualties, border-crossing situations and the psychological pressure expressed in physical gestures. The mortal as part of everyday life is also an important subject expressed in performances and gestures dealing with masculinity and war acts and the role of memory and the lost lives in war zones.  

With the performance “We have thought about you” Urnamo creates is a welcoming gesture at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde. Along a extensive table ofchopped up onions and white flowers, the two performers welcomes the audience attending the festival, in tears.

Ali Al-Fatlawi & Wathik Al-Ameri won the Price performance Switzerland in 2011, which was followed more recently with the prestigious Swiss Art Award 2012. Ali Al-Fatlawi & Wathiq Al-Ameri are based in Switzerland and collaborate together as part of the studio Urnamo founded in 2002. They have known each other since childhood and studied together at the Bagdad Arts Academy in Iraq and F+F Submit Schule für Kunst und Design.

Monday June 27 - Saturday July 2 - Roskilde Festival

At the Roskilde Festival Ali Al-Fatlawi and Wathiq Al-Ameri will create an “Iraqi Pavilion” in a tent on the camping grounds. The tent will be inhabited by themselves, where they will eat, sleep, perform and integrate with the life of the other campers. Only the tent will be slightly differently equipped than the surrounding ones - with flags and banners written in Arabic; inside the tent a TV will be showing Iraqi news and another one will be tuned into an Iraqi music channel loudly playing. The tent is open - public and neighbors are welcome. The artists will cook tea in a Samowar and offer the tea with typical oriental tea glasses to the visitors.

During the festival the artists will talk to visitors of the pavilion and write poetry on the tent canvas. The “Pavilion of Iraq” is an interventive durational performance that challenges the expectations and fears that are connected to Arab and Muslim culture.

Aman Mojadidi

What They Fear

Monday June 27 -  Wednesday June 29 - Roskilde Festival

The idea for an “Immunization Clinic” at the Roskilde Festival relates to the crisis of migration that Europe, and Denmark, has responded to it in different ways; and which can be seen as rooted in the notion of Immunization - What (and in this case WHO) do we choose to immunize ourselves against? And what is it that we seek to be immunized from - Ideas? Religions? Races? Nationalisms? Extremisms? Political ideologies? Open borders? The resulting performative installation will take form as a tent clinic (as the medical care tents placed at the festival); with medical staff working behind desks and where generic vaccines or liquid tinctures, drops, given by medical staff (under the tongue) will be available so visitors may be immunized. Ones choice of “vaccine” shows whether you are either with or against the immigrant policies of the current Danish government. The right wing government of Denmark has taken a strong stance towards the wave of migrants arriving in Europe, largely from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Eritrea, etc. What is your position?

There will be a list of “vaccines” and subjects to be vaccinated against such as Islam, Blackness, Racism, Extreme Right or Extreme Left Politics, Arabness, Eugenics etc. The medical staff and technicians will wear see-through protective outfits and there will be glass cabinets with medical gear. The technicians are seated at stations with medical cabinets storing the necessary materials to carry out the immunization shot. The technicians will be carrying out their duties, checking supplies, checking the vaccines, adjusting materials, while patients are treated.

Amanullah Mojadidi is Afghan and American born in Florida (1971) and lives in Paris and Kabul. He has amongst other done a fashion line of clothing for suicide bombers and soldiers called "Conflict Chic" and photography exploring the connection between Kabul City and the American Confederate South. His art has been shown in international contemporary art exhibitions, including dOCUMENTA (13) and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2012. Mojadidi also curated a 2012 Documenta exhibition in Kabul, which showcased 12 contemporary Afghan artists. 

Amy Lee Sanford

Full Circle

Performance
Saturday June 25 & Sunday June 26 - Garden, Museum of Contemporary Art

Humans experience the process of leaving home, leaving or losing near ones and arriving elsewhere differently. Full Circle, Roskilde 2016 is a meditative and introspective performance, exploring cycles of human trauma, healing, and the reconstruction of life in the present.

Artist Amy Lee Sanford sits with several utilitarian Cambodian clay pots (made in her ancestral home province of Kampong Chhnang in Cambodia). She breaks and repairs each pot over two days in the garden of the Museum for Contemporary Art in Roskilde. After each pot is glued back together the artist uses string to encircle the repaired it, before returning the pot to its original location on the stage. During the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge regime, which orchestrated the genocide in Cambodia, millions of Cambodians were enslaved, tortured and killed or died of starvation, disease and overwork. This durational performance consists of breaking and remaking clay pots to bring attention to the cycles of human trauma, the experience of sudden loss, and the reestablishment of life both personally and societally.

Single Break Pot: Darupvej
Monday June 27 - Tyesday June 28 - Roskilde Festival

Humans experience the process of leaving home, leaving or losing near ones and arriving elsewhere differently. Single Break Pot: The Roskilde Festival is a meditative and introspective performance, exploring cycles of human trauma, healing, and the reconstruction of life in the present.

Artist Amy Lee Sanford sits with one utilitarian Cambodian clay pots (made in her ancestral home province of Kampong Chhnang in Cambodia). She breaks and repairs each pot at the Roskilde Train Station. After the pot is glued back together the artist uses string to encircle the repaired it, before returning the pot to it's original location in the performance. During the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge regime, which orchestrated the genocide in Cambodia, millions of Cambodians were enslaved, tortured and killed or died of starvation, disease and overwork. This durational performance consists of breaking and remaking clay pots to bring attention to the cycles of human trauma, the experience of sudden loss, and the reestablishment of life both personally and societally.

Amy Lee Sanford studied Visual Art at Brown University, with concentrated study in Engineering and Biology. She also studied ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design, University of Massachusetts and Harvard. In 2005, Amy returned to Cambodia for the first time in 30 years in search of her family and heritage.

Athi-Patra Ruga

decimination

Procession
Sunday June 26  juni - Museum of Contemporary Art - Roskilde Festival

Athi-Patra Ruga presents the newly conceived performance ”Decimation” as a festive procession from the Museum of Contemporary Art to the Roskilde Festival grounds. Dressed up in lustrous outfits, a swarm of balloons, LED lights and heels, the core of the procession, invited drag-performers, will prepare and pose at the yard of the museum. Followers (audience) are encouraged to come along, granted sticks as the procession starts. On the way to the Festival grounds the troupe might grow or slim down. Mingling with the streams of people headed towards the festival area to camp, the “Decimation” procession will include new followers, yet in the end a selection process will take place. The destination of the procession is a sacredly decorated tree in the festival grounds, where objects and lights will be hanging down. Here everyone will assemble and there will be a ritual involving the audience and the sticks brought along, deciding who belongs and who does not in ‘the state of Azania’, a state in becoming.

As background information ‘decimation’ as a concept refers to a mass punishment tool used by the Roman Army, where many hundreds soldiers were selected for punishment by decimation (the word in Latin meaning ‘a tenth of’ something, e.g. a group). They were divided into groups of ten; each group drew lots, and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning or clubbing.

Within the artistic universe of Athi-Patra Ruga, this is the “Decimation” chapter of the myth of “The Future White Women of Azania”. This is a myth where he invents and treats alternate identities and marginalized life experiences, and creates different chapters with performances and tapestries. Ruga has, over the years, been developing in his work. In “The Future White Women of Azania”, he is turning his attention to an idea intimately linked to the apartheid era’s fiction of Azania – a Southern African decolonialised arcadia. This myth was developed by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), who appropriated the name in 1965 as the signifier of an ideal future South Africa.

In this performance however Ruga is speaking about “A Jazzy kinda decimation”, a playful way of softly shoving people in or out of the group with sticks or gestures. “It turns out that a decimation must be carried out on the Future White Women of Azania, whereby one member from ten sets of regiments is executed for the betrayals, desertion of the Azanians-in-Exile” as Ruga explains. This is also the image of the current practice of nation-building, where issues of belonging and non-belonging are at stake, where “the National Body is somehow allergic to outside influenza,” as Ruga describes it.

Athi-Patra Ruga (1984) lives in Johannesburg and Cape town, South Africa. He showed “The Elder of Azania”, a solo performance at the Johannesburg Pavilion, 56th La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, and recently took part in the group show “AFRICA: Architecture, Culture and Identity”, at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Louisiana, Denmark. He also took part in Performa 11, New York, 2011. 

Bernard Akoi-Jackson

…it’s imperative, staying put, put into globalized imperative contexts, is imperative…

Performance
Saturday June 25 & Sunday June 26 - Old City Hall, Byens Hus

The artist Bernard Akoi-Jackson creates participatory performances highlighting the pitfalls of the practical administration of immigration law and the language use in this context. His performances point at state administration procedures as a form of national self-protection against migration.

In his new performance presented at Byens Hus in Roskilde (the old city hall), “…it’s imperative, staying put, put into globalized imperative contexts, is imperative…”, assistants usher audiences/“applicants” through labyrinths of administrative steps. Paperwork, border controls, thumbprinting and formulas to be filled in and revisited by “officials” as well as absurd tasks formulated in confusing administrative language is what the audience is exposed to. On the way through the system with many traps, the audience also encounter certain entice goods like sugar, gold, rock and sea salt. They go through all this in order to finally get a stamp as [NON-IMMIGRANT SELF], [IMMIGRANT OTHER], [NOMADIC CITIZEN] or [DIPLOMATIC VIP] by the administrators.

After the audiences has completed all requested tasks they are set to wait in front of a pseudo-altar in order to be called up to a celebrant, the authority, an ambiguous being enacted by Akoi-Jackson, to receive their certificate and slice of Ghanaian chocolate and Dutch Schnapps. The whole episode is filmed by CCTVs. The performance is in many ways a continuation of the the recent systemized performance by the artist at Lilith Performance Studio in Malmø, “Untitled: How to Usher the [an] African fully into [His]tory…”, 2015.

Akoi-Jackson moves between different genres; performance, dance, poetry, installation, photography and video to confront the complexities of the specific cultural moment. He recently took part in the group exhibition “If you love me - Loco Shed of the Kumasi Railway”, Accra, 2016 and performed at Lilith Performance Studios, “Wata don Pass - Looking West”, 2015. He also exhibited as part of “Time, Trade & Travel”, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam - SMBA, Amsterdam, 2012. He received his BFA and MFA from the College of Art and Social Sciences, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi in 2003 and 2006 respectively. He is now a professor at KNUST, Kumasi, Ghana. 

Harold Offeh

Choreograph Me

Performance
Saturday June 25 - Museum of Contemporary Art

“Choreograph Me” is an ongoing project in which artist Harold Offeh invites the audience to use his body as a material for the production of a series of performative gestures. Visitors will have the opportunity to generate instructions for actions, movements and gestures that Offeh performs live for one hour. The audience will be invited to participate and join Offeh in the fulfillment of the instructions, or to direct and edit from afar (holding up text boards). “Choreograph Me”, originally commissioned by MiMA, Middleborough, uses the framework of instructions to form a collectively choreographed piece. By offering his body as a material to be experimented with, Offeh explores the question of how an artist can be used as a sculptural material and his labor made useful to an audience.

For “Choreograph Me” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde, Offeh will re-stage the work inviting audiences to direct and lead him. The performance will last up till one hour. The audience is provided with a series of printed texts that refer to movements or actions. They can use the texts to direct and instruct the artist or they can create new instructions by writing words on paper. Offeh is interested in the relations between body, space, race and gender, but also between audience and performer. The crossover between moving image and live performance and the common references of film and songs inform his work.

Harold Offeh was born in Ghana (1977). He studied Fine Art at Brighton University and Fine Art Photography at the Royal College of Art, London. He has shown widely both in Britain and abroad; including East International, Norwich; At Your Service, David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Espaco Bananeiras, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Metropolis Rise, CQL Design Center, Shanghai, China.

Michéle Magema

What the Sea didn’t Take Off Me

Michèle Magema’s performance “What the Sea didn’t Take Off Me“ takes is cue from the disparition of 400 migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean sea in April 2016. 400 people out of a thousand die every month in the Mediterranean sea in an effort to reach Europe. The work questions processes of migration and the risks taken by people to transgress frontiers.

Magema’s work calls on the memory of the body: the body as the entity which  carries in itself the memory of other individuals in the family and in  society. Magema’s work situates itself between History with a capital H and individual histories, with her body in action using symbols and repeatedly implementing gestures that become rites. Through artistic action her  work is political and a form of resistance to the world.

In the performance “What the Sea didn’t Take Off Me“ Magema acts barefooted and dressed in white with bandages representing the souls of 400 drowned migrants between Egypt and Italy. She traverses a purple powder path of potassium permanganate compound. Potassium permanganate, which is  known under the name of "Crystal Condy", is also a medicine that heals the skin and irritations. She traverses this path as a path of appeasement for sick and dead bodies.

Moe Satt

Wishes of Hands

Performance
Saturday June 25 - Garden & Court Yard, Museum of Contemporary Art

As a performance artist Moe Satt mostly works with meaningful hand gestures - communication, work and routine gestures. The hand as a medium of inter-human gestures can communicate beyond spoken language - who you are, what you are used to do with your hands etc. In the performance “Wishes of Hands”, Satt creates banners with drawn contours of hands on them, on which he writes wishes present in the context where the work is displayed. In the contemplative garden of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Satt carries the banners and wave them in the air till he places them on the ground. The wishes written on the banners are recognised by a parodic ritual at the end, questioning the honesty or purpose of wishing as such.

Satt has worked with the meaning of hand gestures in several former works, which include the “Face and Fingers” (2008-09) photographs, wherein Satt invents and enumerates 108 different poses with names such as ‘Gun’ and ‘Wave.’ He has also created the video works “Hands around in Yangon” (2012) that closely examines people’s hands at profane, not sacred, work around the city; and “Five Questions to the Society where I Live” (2015), a silent language of hand signals for use in anticipation of the national election. “I use body parts as a means of expression in my work. In performance art, I play mostly with meaningful and meaningless hand positions and actions. I base these on positions of my own body combined with spaces to challenge and experiment with my body’s levels of endurance.”

At the museum Moe Satt will also create a local Pop-up bar with cocktails that tell a story about the political and historical situation in Burma. The “Pegu Club” cocktail (Gin, Orange Curacao, Fresh Lime, Dash of Bitter) will be served. Pegu Club was a Victorian-Style Gentlemen's Club in Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar) – one of the most famous clubs in Southeast Asia. The name of the cocktail was a signature of the Pegu Club. The “Democrat” cocktail (Bourbon Whisky, Fresh Lemon juice, Peach Liqueur, Honey Syrup) will also be offered. “Democrat”, Satt explains, “is an American cocktail but I like the name of it. The reason I choose the "Democrat" is because Myanmar is now in an transition era from Military Junta to Democratic nation.”

Moe Satt is the Initiator of the performance festival Beyond Pressure "Beyond Pressure Public Art Festival" (2008-2014) in Myanmar, Burma, and was nominated for the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award 2015. He recently took part in the exhibition “A Journal of the Plague Year”, Kadist Art Foundation and The Lab, San Francisco, USA, 2015, and curated the exhibition "Silent For A While", 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong, 2016.

Mwangi Hutter

X marks the Spot

Friday July 1 - Roskilde Festival

Mwangi Hutter is an artist duo (Ingrid Mwangi and Robert Hutter) interested in exploring the idea of “self” and the mutation of the self through others. They are interested in how to create a common voice. Their performances thus question the stable definition of the self and the collective. In their performances they engage with the body, collective histories and trauma. In the context of the Roskilde Festival Mwangi Hutter has developed a new participatory performance called “X marks the Spot”. Here, circa 200 volunteers, performing participants (festival goers and others) are invited to place themselves in a grid and wrap themselves deliberately in colored gauze (red and black). Together they will create a visual impression of the Danish flag - with a black cross instead of a white one - temporarily on the ground in front of Orange stage.

The audience can watch the live action as well as the perspective offered by aerial videography presented on a large-scale video-projection screen. The title refers to the white cross in the Danish flag and plays with its symbolism - could the white cross also be transformed into a target? The performance opens the devious associations connected to this national symbol and the status of nationalism in Denmark. It also questions the associations connected to white and black. 

Their recent international exhibitions includes, among others: "Heaven, Hell, Purgatory – The Divine Comedy from the Perspective of Contemporary African Artists", Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, 2015 and "VISIONS. An Atmosphere of Change", Marta Herford Museum, 2013 as well as “Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa”, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of African Art - NMAfA, Washington DC, 2013.

Nathalie Mba bikoro

When The Hero Disrobes Her Armour Giving Birth To Quiet Revolutions

Saturday June 25 - Museum of Contemporary Art

For the installation-performance “When The Hero Disrobes Her Armour Giving Birth To Quiet Revolutions” items of contemporary refugee clothes worn on flight (and sold in markets in Berlin) build a pile in the middle of the museum courtyard. The clothes en-masse represent a bigger narrative of migration and nationality as well as the resistance against oppression by the nation state and the political regime in the country the person migrated from. Each item is selected, worn, washed in red color and cut into the shape of kites by the artist. Gradually these clothes are removed to create a pile in the center of a concentric sound installation with megaphones. These kites may fly or not but they are a stark monument of the paradigm of migration, identity and border-crossing. The kite is a symbol or a memory that creates new birth for oppositions and alternative ways of understanding the spirit of nomadism. The repetition of recorded voices from colonial camps - human zoos, labor camps, where anthropological and film experiments took place - erected during first and second world war in Germany, this becomes an alarm call to agency and urgency not only for the past but for contemporary life.

During Bikoro’s personal research, for the project “Squat Monument” in Berlin 2015, within the collection of colonial voices housed in the LautArchiv at Humboldt Berlin and Basler Afrikanisher Bibliographen, she has exposed unexpected finds; the voices of female resistance movements speaking from colonial camps (as normally only male voices were recorded), from universities, movie sets, human zoos and in German settlements in Namibia. These are played throughout the performance-installation “When The Hero Disrobes Her Armour Giving Birth To Quiet Revolutions”. Unexplored and neglected for many decades, these voices speak about freedom, memory, resistance and poetry. The voices in the megaphones gradually change over the course of the action. Bikoro mixes these historical voices of resistance with contemporary recordings from markets in Yaounde. These markets define territories of political resistance, union and organization through the voices of women selling goods. Each voice describes items, chants emancipation rights, and political oppositions. A sonorous geography of migration as resistance.

Nathalie Bikoro is from Gabon (1985), she holds a PHD in Political philosophy, media arts and development of Africa from Greenwich University in London. She has exhibited at the 10th Dak’Art Biennale, won international prizes of Fondation Blachere France and Afrique Soleil, Mali. Bikoro is also performance curator at Savvy Contemporary in Berlin.