Between One Time and Another

Special hours during Art Cologne (April 15-17): 11am–6pm
 

The Temporary Gallery presents Between One Time and Another, a group show guest-curated by Jens Maier-Rothe featuring the artists Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Fadlabi, Rana Hamadeh and Kapwani Kiwanga. The exhibition evolves from Maier-Rothe’s research and interest in the notion of projection with its cultural and historical implications. Particular focus is placed on colonial and hegemonic moments of projection that appear already historicised and past, although they continue to govern the extended presence of traditional power relations.

Between One Time and Another refracts a single history into multiple stories. By re-choreographing them in a new light—suspended in time and decomposed into narrative textures and ideological inflections—the legibility of accounts is transformed, shedding insight into the workings of their historical effects. The works presented speculate on future-pasts, they question stratigraphic oracles and expose new concepts of “otherness” as out-dated strategies of alienation. Mute things are given voice and once-forgotten ideas reappear as fantastic interpretations of today’s power balances, yielding collections of told stories and untold histories, strange encounters with local heroes and fossil witnesses of colonial inversion. Together they create a multi-perspective projection machine, sharpening our sense for the dense narrative layering of power, violence and hegemony over the supposed “Other.”

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s daily changing film programme Images Fanon. Concerning Solitude (2011–ongoing) is based on Images Fanon, a screening programme originally shown in 1987 during a memorial event for the writer, politician and pioneer of decolonisation Frantz Fanon in Algiers. Abonnenc has reconstructed the original programme, though some films have disappeared or were destroyed. Under the additional title Concerning Solitude, the artist fills the blank spaces with selected materials ranging from popular culture to speeches by key historical figures.

For Fadlabi, telling stories is telling history. Every day, people around the world lose touch with their historical narratives. Their access to them is forcibly interrupted and mutilated; the underlying social relations of their narrative culture are destroyed and last memories of it expelled. For them, there is nothing left but the insoluble task of keeping the legacy of a lost history alive. Fadlabi’s murals and installations are building blocks of precisely this kind of commemorative culture. They momentarily appear at certain places, like his personal Local Heroes (2010–ongoing) and the multi-layered narratives from which they are drawn.

Rana Hamadeh stages two complementary sketches of her new opera-under-development in a live performance and an installation. Hamadeh’s immersive sound play, Can You Pull In an Actor With a Fishhook or Tie Down His Tongue With a Rope? (2015), decrypts the affective layers of the Ashura ritual, an annual Shiite ceremony that re-enacts the historical slaying of Imam al Hussein (626–80 AD). Looking at the configurations of power in the Syrian-Lebanese political weave, the performance re-dramatizes the ritual’s recent transformation from militant theatre into a militarized form of theatre. Hamadeh’s installation, Can You Make a Pet of Him Like a Bird or Put Him on a Leash For Your Girls? (2014-2015), serves as a proposal for the opera’s scenography, extracting textual elements from the play and recasting them as stage setting without actors.

Kapwani Kiwanga approaches the history of African-European relations via the so-called “Afrotunnel,” a hypothetical underwater passage between Morocco and Spain along the Strait of Gibraltar. Using geological, cultural, and technological artefacts, her multimedia installation Strata (Technicolor) (2016) interprets tectonic shifts as a restructuring of ideological influences in a narrative constellation that is both historical and speculative in nature. History is sheer projection, in which myths and legends merge with historical and scientific theory—or so it seems when a geographer, a baker and a fossil, along with sailors and the wind, reflect upon the origin of the continents and oceans.

The exhibition is funded and supported by
Academy of the Arts of the World Cologne, Kunststiftung NRW, OCA Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Royal Norwegian Embassy, Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Institut Français, Cultural Department of the City of Cologne, RheinEnergie Stiftung, Deltax contemporary, Hotel Chelsea Cologne


About Temporary Gallery
The Temporary Gallery is a non-profit art institution based in Cologne, and directed by Regina Barunke since 2012. It shows exhibitions and provides discursive formats in the context of contemporary art practice and theory. Cooperation with guest curators—internationally as locally, art scientists as experts from various cultural fields—alternate with solo presentations and a manifold educational programme.

For further information, please contact: Baptist Ohrtmann, info [​at​] temporarygallery.org