Summer 2023 program

The Kunstverein Braunschweig is pleased to announce its summer program.

Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Nina Emge, Lamin Fofana, Barbara Kapusta, Ndayé Kouagou, Tarek Lakhrissi, Julia Phillips:  Words Don’t Go There
July 1–October 1, 2023

The interdisciplinary exhibition project Words Don’t Go There presents spatial sound and text works as well as videos and performances that focus on poetry and language as a means of (world) inquiry. The exhibition is decisively based on the writings of Black queer thinker and poet Fred Moten; his experience of otherness with his “mother tongue” English provides the abysmal launching point for this collaborative project. He explains that language is a central tool in his experience and questioning of the world. It is through language that Moten can relate to the social world, express its joys, and name its grievances. However, he finds that language is characterized by a fundamental inadequacy: In the dominant language numerous ways of experiencing the world find no place. They cannot be expressed in their diversity, abundance, and pain by conventional means. As Moten says, “Words don’t go there”.

The artistic contributions reveal this limiting effect of language and reflect on its social, political and poetic consequences. Through sound and acoustics, sculptural practice, performance or silence, they intervene in the existing linguistic and architectural environment of Villa Salve Hopes, a former bourgeois Villa which is today home of the Kunstverein Braunschweig. They enable marginalized voices to be heard, overwrite unambiguously inhabited spaces, open up new ways of accessing the world by breaking away from everyday understandings of language, uncovering unexpected horizons of possibility, and placing hitherto marginalized experiences and forms of expression at the center. The exhibition also consists of workshops, lectures, and performances that take up and expand upon the themes and concerns of the project in manifold ways.

Curator: Benedikt Johannes Seerieder
Curatorial assistance: Gesa Vorpahl

Daniel Lie + Juliana dos Santos: Das, was nicht geerbt werden kann / Aquilo que não se herda
July 1–October 1, 2023

Daniel Lie’s and Juliana dos Santos’s artistic work is characterized by performative installations and drawings. Lie is of Indonesian-Brazilian descent and Santos is an African-descent artist. Their socio-geographical backgrounds run throughout their artistic practice, forming the basis for much of their individual as well as collaborative research and investigation. For the Remise of the Kunstverein, the artists developed a duo exhibition in which they continue a dialogue that began nearly a decade ago, based on their own personal biographies.

The exhibition Das, was nicht geerbt werden kann / Aquilo que não se herda (What is not inherited) is inspired by the drawings of two people that played a key role in both of the artists’ lifes. Lie observes spontaneous scribbles made during telephone conversations by Iranilda da Costa; Juliana dos Santo’s works are based on Eliana de Oliveiras’ notebooks of study and geometric drawing exercises. Starting from these found drawings, both artists developed further techniques as a creative exercise that go beyond their individual poetic research. The aim of these exercises is to explore these found drawings and images in other forms and materials—on paper, as volumes or as shadows and light—and thus enter into a new poetic encounter.

What is not inherited can be all that is not transferable, that is unique, inseparable from a person: their traces, lines, handwriting, drawings. For the Kunstverein, Lie and Santos make visible the connections between drawings of people who played a crucial role in their affective and artistic development.

Eliana de Oliveira became the mother of Juliana dos Santos in 1987 and Iranilda da Costa became the mother of Daniel Lie in 1988.

Curator: Nuno de Brito Rocha
Curatorial assistance: Gesa Vorpahl
 

The exhibitions are supported by: