OtherNetwork: Delay and Encounter and/or Other Proximate Unknowns

“To the real question, how does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.”
—W.E.B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk)

Emerging from, speculating with, and working alongside the words and figure of W.E.B. Du Bois, the curatorial project Delay and Encounter and/or Other Proximate Unknowns muses on a poetics of the imminent unknown—a Black unknown. Not unlike a hazy dream sequence, the exhibition is installed across the site of Du Bois’s former home and final resting place in Accra, and grapples with a certain intimate disorganisation within conditions of the Black Outside. Imagined as an actant for unknown and unknowable becomings, the project configures around how images and encounters, with more than human elements, might inform the (dis)connections between bodies and space. How do they impel our becoming? Traipsing a line neither sanguine nor dystopian, the installations are cartographies of an amorphous world. The works are an interstice; symbolic fragments in affective proximity that challenge, deploy, negate, reify, and mirror the beginning of an end and/or the end of a beginning. They wander outside, towards the end of the world as we know it.

The exhibition is configured around three reparative propositions:

A Collective Assemblage of Enunciation
In thinking of and with voice, one is beleaguered by its intonations, the varied rhythms that impel us elsewhere, its shifting and plural inflections, as well as its sentiment from one body to another. Within this moment of collective meeting, we bring together a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous sentiments whose performances are never resolved. 

Affirmative Sabotage as Method
Can we possibly give credence to and venerate the interlude sometimes?

Feeling for the Wall after Collapse
What are the particularities of Black Feelings? Feeling Black as both a rejoinder and form of refusal.

Delay and Encounter and/or Other Proximate Unknowns brings together six positions from internationally-based practitioners including Jabu Arnell, Ola Hassanain, Nii Noi Nortey, Natalie Paneng, Luana Vitra and room19isaFactory. The collective responses grapple with sonicity and gathering, Black study, built environments and spatial discourse, ecologies, processes of collectivity, and archiving. From this vantage point, outside denotes a particular spatio-temporal disposition. One can think of being outside with, or the particularities of the emergence of something outside and/or its being outside. Being outside of—within this context—implies a certain dis-identification with a familiar feeling. The Black Outside can thus be understood as a paradoxical assemblage of malleable and contingent forms of being, doing, occupying, and inhabiting. One would analogize its sentiment to a cacophony of disparate elements not unlike a free-form jazz improvisation. The objects, images and performances within the exhibition are a dexterous utterance of poetically dissonant worlds. Uttering loudly and sometimes phlegmatically, at times mnemonic and referential to other worlds unknown, the works conjure up forgotten private moments, repressed images, events and non-events. They stage a performance of discontinuity. Like the chaotic imbrication of contemporary life, meaning overlaps, meanders and gets lost. A mapping of multiple meanings occurs, where utterance coalesces with the disjunctive act to formulate a new lexicon, one that subsists on opacity.

Delay and Encounter and/or Other Proximate Unknowns is curated by Sinethemba Twalo for NGO-Nothing Gets Organised. The project is initiated within the context of OtherNetwork, a collaborative project that connects independent art spaces worldwide. The ongoing curatorial project of OtherNetwork takes the form of a relay: for this iteration, Foundation for Contemporary Art Ghana invited NGO from Johannesburg to guest curate an exhibition at their space in Accra.

OtherNetwork is a project by ifa—Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen in collaboration with Cookies.