Women on Aeroplanes: Filter

First iteration filters cinematic presence and absence of women out of a representation of independence history

Looking closely at the long history of transatlantic networks and the struggles for liberation, predating the independences on the African continent, women were always important and played all kinds of roles. But their stories are hardly told and their faces remain widely invisible. Their various contributions and practices, politically and artistically ask to be acknowledged and at the same time their stories claim new parameters and premises. To recall the notion of independence today can only mean to address the gap between formal independence and a process of decolonisation that was simultaneously national and intranational, transnational and international and which remains, in many ways, incomplete. 

The research based project Women on Aeroplanes aims to get an idea of a more comprehensive notion of independence which allows us to see and understand a women-informed view on a shattered presence of complicated dependencies. In this regard, unorthodox perspectives and a focus on entangled working and gender relations need to be raised, that exceeds a project of replacing the heroes of independence with the heroines of liberation. To make her contribution in history and the moments of her disappearance visible also asks for a different valorisation of her work and a picture that frames relations and communities rather than individuals.

The project will lead to different formats of exhibition, workshop, film programme, lecture series and residencies envisioned for five iterations in Africa and Europe with institutional and independent partners; it will touch down in ifa-Gallery (Berlin), in the Centre for Contemporary Art (Lagos), at Iwalewahaus (Bayreuth), in The Showroom (London) and in the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

The first iteration of Women on Aeroplanes at ifa Gallery Berlin, Filter, comprises a series of pilot experiments dedicated to filter the cinematic presence of women out of a representation of history and its tendency to blur her active, politicised if not militant credibility. The objective of the four days activities at ifa-Gallery is to play with different critical, theoretical and optical filters as a preliminary work for the making of tools (a grammar) to speak to her representation and history making from a different imagery. The series of presentations, screenings and discussions aims to transform the gallery space into an editing room for her picture to unfold from the ephemeral. Editors, artists, archival researchers and producers, historians and curators, will discuss processes of decision making and criteria that lead to the next cut, the duration of a take, its rhythm. The outcome of this filtering process will be reflected together with the methods of editing as a tool to address her visibility.

Participants/Berlin: Fatoumata Diabaté (Montpellier), artist / Ndidi Dike (Lagos), artist, cultural activist / Jihan El Tahri (Paris), filmmaker and writer / Kodwo Eshun (London), artist and writer / Shahira Issa (Berlin), artist, editor / Brigitta Kuster (Berlin), artist and theoretician / Michelle Monareng (Johannesburg), artist and researcher / Uche Okpa-Iroha (Lagos), artist / Iheanyichukwu Onwuegbucha (Lagos), researcher / Emily Pethick (London), curator, director of The Showroom / Lisl Ponger (Wien), artist / Cara Snyman (Johannesburg), arts and culture manager / Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa (London), artist and curator.

Women on Aeroplanes is a project by Annett Busch, Marie-Hélène Gutberlet & Magda Lipska coproduced by Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth.

Funded by the TURN Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.          

In collaboration with Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, ifa-Galerie Berlin, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, The Showroom, London.