Affective Utopia

Ângela Ferreira Kiluanji Kia Henda

Sammy Baloji & Filip De Boeck Luis Camnitzer

Paulo NazarethGrada Kilomba

Reynier Leyva NovoAlfredo Jaar

Curated by: Bruno Leitão and Mónica de Miranda, directors of Hangar, Lisbon.

Published by KADIST: Émilie Villez, Sophie Potelon, Martina  Sabbadini, Élodie Royer, assisted by Anthony Ohannessian, Juliette Hage, Katia Porro.Texts: Bruno Leitão and Mónica de MirandaProofreading and French translation: IDIOMATIQUESDesign: Maëlle BrientiniInstallation: Corégie Expo, Samah Slim

With the support of:El Apartamento, Havana, Cuba

KADIST would like to thank:The artists: Sammy Baloji, Filip De Boeck, Luis Camnitzer, Ângela  Ferreira, Alfredo Jaar, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Grada Kilomba, Reynier Leyva Novo, Paulo Nazareth.Lenders: Galerie Imane Farès, Paris, France (Imane Farès, Line Ajan); Alexander Gray Associates, New York, USA (Alex  Santana, Alejandro Jassan); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York,  USA (Richard Armstrong, Indira Abiskaroon,  Tracey  Bashkoff, Amara  Antilla); Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon, Portugal  (Mafalda Franco); kamel  mennour, Paris, France (Lorenza Brandodoro); Galleria Fonti, Naples, Italy (Luigi Giovinazzo); El Apartamento, La  Havana, Cuba; Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (Emma Laurence); Mendes Wood Gallery, São Paulo, Brazil / New York, USA / Brussels, Belgium (Matthew Wood, Renato Silva, Rafaella Tamm, Matheus Yehudi);And: Twenty Nine Studio & Production; Dominique Malaquais; Julie Perrier; Tanguy Gatay; Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico (Begoña Hano); Laure Poupard; Michelle Sanchez; Moses  Leo; Galleria Continua, San Gimignano/Beijing/Les Moulins/Havana; Villa  Vassilieff, Paris, France (Camille Chenais); gb agency, Paris, France (Églantine Mercader); the Hangar team.

19 bis - 21 rue des Trois Frères 75018 Paris. +33 (0)1 42 51 83 49 kadist.org

This publication was produced in the framework of the exhibition:

Affective Utopia 02.08.19 – 04.21.19

Hangar in Lisbon produces exhibitions as spaces of  action for public engagement beyond spectatorship and through strategies that produce sociality.  Hangar is comprised of a center of exhibitions, artistic  residencies, and artistic studies. It is also a center of education, talks and conversations that unify geographic locations and stimulate the development of artistic and theoretical practices. Its artistic program is focused on South/ North problematics, starting from the specific position that Lisbon occupies both geographically and historically. The artists presented in Affective Utopia have all worked with Hangar through residencies, talks, or exhibitions. Delocalized at KADIST during the time of this exhibition, Bruno Leitão and Mónica de Miranda’s project will reframe their approach towards public engagement in another context and towards another audience.

Utopia has become a disputed concept, spanning the field between the belief in an ideal society, the  dystopian experience, and the imaginative modeling of alternative worlds as intimations of possibility. Furthermore, the obsession occasioned by the failures of utopian enterprises drives the effort to improve them, thence to build a new experience of place, space, and time. Originally, Thomas More’s atheistic republic was described in his 1516 novel, Utopia, in the form of an eponymous  island. Ever since, the word has denoted any vision of a perfect society which plays the role of an ideal for a social movement advocating changes to existing conditions. Within the last decade, the contemporary art scene has witnessed a return to  utopian thinking, and this exhibition aims to reflect these recent developments.

The artists in the exhibition discuss ways of thinking and performing utopia from various angles. The concept entails two contradictory perceptions: the aspiration for a better world, and the acknowledgement that its form may only ever live in our imagination. Affective  Utopia reflects this ambivalence and poses the question of how art can be a critical tool to rethink socialization and the affective geographic concepts of belonging, home, and diaspora.

Strategies are employed towards the understanding of space and place in relation to a subjective sense of belonging. A southward pointing cartography is  utilized as a guide for moving through locations, stimulating a praxis of decolonization of thought. The artists combine the experience of real space with fictional approaches, fragmentation, and mobility, to produce a perception of their affective geographies. The utopian impulse informs activist practices that aspire to progres sive social, racial, or political change and individual freedoms, while simultaneously generating an expanded field of curatorial and artistic conventions.

Affective Utopia will unfold as three chapters and  public events, presenting morphing artistic  encounters as it evolves from one state of enquiry into another, and as artists and works are replaced by others. This action of re-framing concepts will embrace an active form

of investigation. This claims a type of practice that fosters sociality, an embodied form of knowledge production whose material quality is as important as its discursive capacity. The end of the exhibition will be completely different from the beginning. In effect, it will be a large exhibition in a small container, reinforcing the idea of ongoing discussion, and allowing the audience to imagine a dialogue between all the works.

Bruno Leitão and Mónica de Miranda

The first chapter entitled Concrete Utopia brings together three artists and a researcher: Ângela  Ferreira, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Sammy Baloji & Filip De Boeck. It creates a dialogue between works that reflect on roman-ticizing utopia and the possibilities for it, by  looking back at historical events and their retelling, as well as proposing new ways to question hegemonic epistemologies through irony and humor. The works presented  reflect on the expectations and shortcomings of projects around national identity, architecture and public engagement, as well as space programs that re-signify spaces, politics and social life; moving away from colonial language and creating new and unexpected forms of living the city.

First chapter February 8 – March 3

Concrete Utopia

Sammy Baloji & Filip De

Boeck

Kiluanji Kia HendaÂngela Ferreira

Kiluanji Kia Henda’s work Icarus 13, The First Journey to the Sun [1] tells the fictional story of an Angolan space mission to the Sun. Similar to the US space program, it takes the name of a mythological figure, Icarus, a mere mortal who tried to fly high using a pair of wax wings, which melted when he got too close to the sun, and sent him plummeting to his doom. Playing with the idea of power through grandiose projects and architec-ture, Kiluanji Kia Henda shows the obvious contradictions and the need to critically view the past as a form of potential for the future.

1 – Kiluanji Kia Henda, Icarus 13, Astronomy Observatory, Namibe Desert, 2007 Courtesy the artist and Galleria Fonti, Naples

Sammy Baloji & Filip De

Boeck

Kiluanji Kia HendaÂngela Ferreira

Ângela Ferreira’s Study for a monument to Jean Rouch’s Super 8 workshops in Mozambique (nr. 3) [2] commemorates a remarkable episode of her native Mozambique where Jean Rouch and a team of ethnographic filmmakers responded to a call for collaborations with the Center for Communication Studies (CEC of the University Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo) to establish links between the rural and urban areas. They arrived in Maputo in 1976 to run a series of Super 8 workshops at the university and in various rural communities.

The films made in Maputo were taken to the rural  areas and projected in communal villages. During the day, trainees filmed life in the villages. This footage was  later edited and shown in the city. Ferreira’s piece is also a reference to Robert Smithson’s “underground cinema”.

2 – Ângela Ferreira, Study for a Monument to Jean Rouch’s Super 8 Workshops in Mozambique (nr. 3), 2011 Courtesy Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon

Sammy Baloji and Filip De Boeck’s video The Tower – A Concrete Utopia [3], offers us a reflection in the form of a visual essay on the legacy of colonial architecture in Congo. This video about decay, as well as after life, is a guided tour of a remarkable building in the municipality of Limete, Kinshasa that has been under construction since 2003 by its owner, the “Docteur”. In a testament to self-built structures, the fragile balance between utopia and dystopia is enacted in a quasi-performative way.

3 – Sammy Baloji and Filip De Boeck, The Tower – A Concrete Utopia, 2016 Courtesy the authors and Galerie Imane Farès, Paris

The second chapter, Art as a Critical Tool,  presents works by three South American artists from different generations: Luis  Camnitzer, Alfredo  Jaar and Reynier Leyva Novo. This exhibition reflects on how art can be a form of critical thinking and a form of empathy, by forcing a connection between artist and audience. This complex interrelation provokes ways of re-signifying structures, places, and ideas. Since knowledge is power, expanding its boundaries by use of an artist-artwork-audience  system is a redistribution of such. Here, ideas such as gender, decolonization, and the non-inclusion of subaltern histories can be questioned.

Second chapter March 7 – March 24

Art as a Critical Tool

Alfredo JaarReynier Leyva Novo

Luis Camnitzer

4 – Luis Camnitzer, Lección de historia del arte, Lesson No 6, 2000 Installation View: “Bajo un mismo sol: Arte de América Latina hoy”, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico, 2015. Collection of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA. Photo: Moritz Bernoully, Courtesy Museo Jumex © Luis Camnitzer/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Art as a Critical Tool

Reynier Leyva Novo

Luis Camnitzer

Luis Camnitzer’s emblematic work, Leçon d’histoire de l’art, no 11 [4], poetically describes the chaotic moment of what the artist considers an “end to the History of Art” and a new beginning, but this time controlled by the public instead of being controlled by a hegemonic power.

The work September 15 [5] by Alfredo Jaar is a simple but effective object that connects the implications of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and predictions made by Marx two centuries before. The envelope holds a photograph of Karl Marx’s grave at Highgate Cemetery in

London; it should only be opened every 15th of September, on the anniversary of the crash of the North American bank.

5 – Alfredo Jaar, September 15, 2009 Courtesy the artist and kamel mennour, Paris

Two works by Reynier Leyva Novo, 12 Wars [6] and A Thousand and One Times Revolution, deal with text as a material that generates meaning. The artist created a software that analyzes the amount of ink used in a text, revealing the uncanny connection between an armistice or a peace treaty and the number of  victims of that conflict. 12 Wars, forms a visual depiction that represents a correspondence of information. A Thousand and One Times Revolution addresses the contradiction between the shifts triggered by the Cuban Revolution and the feeling that things stayed the same.

6 – Reynier Leyva Novo, 12 Wars from the series The Weight of Death, 2016Photo by Ela Bialkowska, courtesy the artist and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano/Beijing/Le Moulin/Havana

The Body as a Political Tool is the title of the third chapter that brings together works by Grada Kilomba and Paulo Nazareth, who use their own bodies as the subject matter, focusing on issues of race, identity, ethnicity, migration, gender, language, and political class. The constant struggle against marginalization, objecti-fication, fetishization, and subsequent erasure of the black body has compelled artists to confront issues of representation in the white male-dominated visual arena. Through simple gestures and decolonized ways

of thinking, the artists call attention to the underlying signs of inequality and its root in history.

Third chapter April 4 – April 21

The Body as a Political Tool

Grada Kilomba

8 – Paulo Nazareth, Untitled, from the series Notícias de América, 2011 Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo/New York/Brussels

Paulo Nazareth

The Body as a Political Tool

Grada Kilomba

In her Illusions [7] series, Grada Kilomba reenacts Greek myths in order to explore the deep roots of cultural oppression. This series questions the implications of the foundational myths at play in the racialization, sexism and social oppression that still haunt our societies.

Notícias de América [8] by Paulo Nazareth is the result of a journey through more than 15 countries in the Americas that the artist made by foot and bus in 2011. The artist started from Brazil and created this work, consisting of performances, social sculptures, drawings, and biographical portraits in video and film to tell a story made of diverse and overlapping ways of being.

7 – Grada Kilomba, Illusions Vol. II, Oedipus, 2018 Installation view at the KW, 10th Berlin Biennale. Photo by Timo Ohler Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery Johannesburg/Cape Town

Sam

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aret

h’s

wor

k dr

aws

on la

ngua

ge, i

deas

, act

ions

, and

obj

ects

in

orde

r to

  est

ablis

h or

rev

eal t

he b

onds

tha

t  exi

st

betw

een

peop

le a

nd t

heir

sur

roun

din

gs.

Sim

ple

but

stro

ng g

estu

res

are

used

to

evok

e hi

stor

ical

mem

ory

as w

ell a

s hi

ghlig

htin

g so

cial

and

eco

nom

ic te

nsio

ns a

nd c

lass

str

uggl

e es

peci

ally

app

aren

t to

him

in B

razi

l and

, m

ore

wid

ely,

in t

he A

mer

icas

and

in A

fric

a.

The

art

ist

has 

mad

e th

e ac

t of

wal

king

the

fo

unda

tion

of h

is a

rtis

tic p

ract

ice.

Thr

ough

 the

ac

t of t

rave

rsin

g co

ntin

ents

by

foot

and

cro

ssin

g bo

rder

s, h

e qu

estio

ns h

is o

wn

sens

e of

sel

f, in

a

cond

itio

n of

phy

sica

l and

sym

bolic

mob

ility

. Grada K

ilomba, née en 19

68

, L

isbonne, P

ortugal. E

lle vit et travaille à B

erlin, A

llemagne. A

rtiste interdisciplinaire et écrivaine, le travail de G

rada Kilom

ba s’intéresse à la m

émoire et plus particulièrem

ent au

x traumatism

es liés à la race, au genre

et à la condition postcolo niale. Elle est surtout

connue pou

r son utilisation sub

versive des pratiques artistiques et son écriture non conventionnelle, tran

sformant le texte en

performance, lui donnant corps, voix et im

age. Pour aborder « la plaie coloniale » com

me

le dit l’artiste, elle crée intentionnellement un

espace  hybride, entre les langages académiques

et artistiques, afin d’explorer des nouveaux form

ats de connaissances sur la question et le récit décolonial, apportant une voix nouvelle, expérim

entale et percutante dans l’art contem

porain et son discours.

Reyn

ier Leyva N

ovo, né en 1983,

La  H

avane, Cuba où il vit et travaille.

Le travail de R

eynier Leyva N

ovo propose une approche très personnelle de la volonté de faire face à l’écriture de l’H

istoire. Sa pratique

pluridisciplinaire comprend l’extraction de

données historiques et de documents officiels

qu’il transform

e en œu

vres formellem

ent m

inimalistes et d’une forte charge conceptuelle.

L’artiste agit comm

e un archéologue mettant

au défi les idéologies et les symboles du pouvoir

en révélant la capacité de l’individu à participer au changem

ent. Il s’est également engagé à

déconstruire les mythes tout en soulignant le

fragment de réalité qui les génère.

Pau

lo Nazareth

, né en 1977, Govern

ador V

aladares, Brésil. Il vit et travaille à travers

le mon

de. Le travail de P

aulo Nazareth

s’appuie sur le langage, les idées, les  actions et les objets dans le but d’établir ou de révéler les liens qui existent entre les personnes et leur environnem

ent. Des gestes sim

ples mais

forts sont utilisés pour évoquer une mém

oire historique ain

si que pour mettre en avant

des tensions sociales, économiques et la lutte

des classes – tension

s qui sont pou

r lui

particulièrement affirm

ées au Brésil et, plu

s largem

ent, dans tou

te l’Am

érique et en

Afrique. L’artiste a fait de l’acte de « m

archer » le fondem

ent de sa pratique artistique. À travers

ses traversées des frontières et des continents à pied, il rem

et en question sa propre  position dan

s une mobilité autant physique que

symbolique.