Untie to Tie: From Movement to Enviroment

With the transdisciplinary project Untie to Tie (2017–2020), ifa Gallery Berlin invites visitors to take part in a discourse on colonial legacies, movement, migration and environment. The second phase Movement perceives diversity and plurality as essential features that make it possible to grasp the present as an ever-changing reality. The programme encourages thinking beyond colonial borders, be they mental or territorial. Movement and migration are understood as emancipatory processes that facilitate interactions between people. The exhibitions Ultrasanity and In the presence/absence of Mazen Kerbaj will close the Movement encounters with a focus on performances, sound art and theatre.

Movement #5
Ultrasanity. On Madness, Sanitation, Antipsychiatry and Resistance
Leo Asemota, Jaswant Guzder, Eva Kot’átková, Tracey Rose
Curators: Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Elena Agudio
2019-12-13 till 2020-02-09

Ultrasanity reconsiders—without the traps of romanticising—the notion of madness and the stigma resulting from being labelled mad. Through this project contemporary concepts and forms of cross- and trans-cultural psychoanalyses and psychiatry beyond a Western rationalization are explored. Essentially, the project demands a reconsideration of the concept of madness as ultrasanity, and asks us to reflect on the relationship between sanitation and sanity as constructs. It allows to look at the gendered, classed and racialised motors that produce and frame what is called madness and mental insanity.

Ultrasanity is a continuation of the longterm investigation The Invention of Science. It is a collaboration of SAVVY Contemporary with ifa Gallery Berlin, Picha Lubumbashi and Gnaoua Festival. The project is funded by the TURN Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes), the Foundation of Arts Initiative and AoN_Platform for Art and Neuroscience.

Opening:
December 13, 2019, 7pm - ifa-Galerie Berlin, Linienstraße 139/140, 10115 Berlin
December 14, 2019, 7pm - SAVVY Contemporary Plantagenstraße 31, 13347 Berlin

Preview:

Movement #6
In the presence/absence of Mazen Kerbaj
Mazen Kerbaj’s art deploys two tropes that are not uncommon in underground comics: auto-biography and politics. An amalgamation of the personal and the historical. However, it extends beyond the panels of comics, it settles in space, and is performed through the political body of the artist. Mazen is not only a witness, he is an actor. This show draws parallels in time, medium, and space. The pieces are put in dialogue, where an idea hastily scribbled on a restaurant’s placemat can be seen continued or developed in a live drawing video. It is like entering a room with a legion of Kerbajs talking, drawing, arguing, and drinking together. Each one of them is the record of a particular moment and a new place; on a spectrum of sobriety; in a varying tongue; and also rendered in a different medium. Kerbaj is always on the move; movement is both a condition of his work, and its subject.

Environment #1
The final phase Environment looks on the consequences colonisation and globalisation have had for the environment and encounters local forms of resistance by those seeking to oppose land appropriation and reassert territorial rights. In 2020 the ifa Galleries in Stuttgart and Berlin will present works by international artists who deal with questions of how we can learn from indigenous communities and foster a new, more responsible relationship with the environment. These movements are striving to preserve concepts of living and ensure their survival into the future. Artists, artisans, activists, researchers and curators from South America, Asia and Africa will (re)activate traditional, handed-down knowledge, using their work to express an affective yet hugely political relationship to the environment. They address the destruction of ecosystems, and with it that of cultural identities. They are aware of the secrets of the forests, the sounds of the rivers, the healing powers of plants, the flight paths of the birds, the colours of the earth—and the power of the collective; and they are willing to share and discuss their knowledge with us.