Earth and Otherly Matters

AFRONAUTS TEASER from Frances Bodomo on Vimeo.

Saturday 21 April 2018, 19:00-22:00 hrs
Location: Stroom Den Haag, Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
RSVP: reserveren@stroom.nl
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Language spoken: English
Lecture/performance and screenings
With:
Kamile Ofoeme, Tabita Rezaire, Frances Bodomo and The Otolith Group

Part of De Dingen (16 - 26 April 2018 at Stroom Den Haag).
>> Download exhibition guide (English only)

In assessing the changing status of things and its affects on human life, we must address the specific material conditions that have lead to this type of knowledge production: from the materials of the earth and the effects and power of extraction, to the politics of reproduction, and the desire to visit outer space - where much of earth's crust and technological advancements originate.

Kamile Ofoeme
The Most Important Thing on Earth

Gold came from outer space in a meteor shower that lasted 200 million years. On earth, gold takes on a range of symbolic and monetary values, from its importance to construct contemporary black masculinities to its maintenance of colonial power in the form of gold reserves. As a material, gold can realise an entirely other future: that of a conductive material on a motherboard, aboard spaceships or as the computer chip that ensures human emotions in cyborgs. Ofoeme's lecture/performance will follow a spec of gold around planet Earth for a billion-year vacation, touching the hands and necks of more than 10 different fictional and actual characters, including Jay-Z, during its stay.
kamofo.wordpress.com

Tabita Rezaire
Sugar Walls Teardom
(2016)
Sugar Walls Teardom explores the contributions of Black womxn's wombs to the advancement of modern medical science and technology. For example the story of Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy, who were the captive guinea pigs to Dr. Marion Sims, the so-called ‘father of modern gynecology' who mutilated and tortured countless slave womxn in the name of science. The story of Henrietta Lacks, who had her cervix cells unknowingly stolen, after which they became the first immortal cells leading to medical breakthroughs reminds us that biological warfare against Black womxn is still pervasive in today's pharmaceutical testing. Sugar Walls Teardom celebrates womb technology through an account of coercive anatomic politics. It pays homage to these womxn - their contributions have not been forgotten.
tabitarezaire.com

Frances Bodomo
Afronauts
(2014)
Afronauts is set on July 16, 1969, the day the Americans launched for the moon, and paints a poetic and surreal picture of Matha Mwamba, a sixteen-year-old Zambian girl who's training to land on Mars. With accompanying actors dressed in khaki uniforms and combat helmets and Matha in her space suit and helmet, Bodomo fuses Zambia's military past with an imagined intergalactic future; militaries are closely connected to space missions, and both are about claiming place and conquest. Inviting the viewer to contemplate history and our futures, Frances Bodomo expands the narrative of the space race beyond the superpowers.
tobogganeer.tumblr.com

Otolith Group
Medium Earth
(2013)
The accumulation of moving images and sounds that make up Medium Earth comprise an audiovisual essay on the millennial time of geology and the infrastructural unconscious of Southern California. Focused on the ways in which tectonic forces express themselves in boulder outcrops and the hairline fractures of cast concrete, Medium Earth participates in the cultures of prophecy and forecasting that mediate the experience of seismic upheaval. The desire to evoke the hidden substrata of the planet gives way to a morphological interpretation of the face of the earth. As an experiment in channeling the system of fault lines buried below California, Medium Earth animates the stresses and strains of physical geographies undergoing continental pressures.
otolithgroup.org

MORE ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Kamile Ofoeme
Kamile Ofoeme is a visual artist and writer living and working in London. Ofoeme's multidisciplinary practice uses visual, aural and performative means to interrogate notions of hybridity, representation, perception and language. His moving image work has explored themes of masculinity, diaspora, choreography, gesture, the gaze and reclamation. He has recently been nominated for New Contemporaries, as well as having his work screened at the Whitechapel Gallery and Camden Arts Centre.

Tabita Rezaire
Tabita Rezaire is a video artist, health-tech-politics practitioner and Kemetic/ Kundalini Yoga teacher based in Johannesburg. She is French of Guyanese and Danish descent. Rezaire's practices unearth the possibilities of decolonial healing through the politics of technology. She is a founding member of the artist group NTU, half of the duo Malaxa, and mother of the energy house SENEB. She has shown at Performa NY, the V&A London, National Gallery of Denmark, Berlin Biennale 09, Tate Modern London, Museum of Modern Art Paris, MoCADA NY, The Broad LA, and Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam.

Frances Bodomo
Frances Bodomo is a Ghanaian filmmaker, writer and director. Her work features "doppelgangers, imaginary friends, ventriloquist dummies, and the un-institutionalized crazies who constantly break society's view of itself." She is based in New York, where she is currently working on a feature-length version of Afronauts with the Sundance Institute, Tribeca Film Institute, IFP's Emerging Storytellers program, and the Alfred P Sloan Foundation. She has been screened nationally and internationally, including the Whitney and at Sundance Festival, and will be showing Afronauts as part of the US Pavilion of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.

The Otolith Group
The Otolith Group consists of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun who live and work in London. They explore the moving image, the archive, the sonic and the aural within the gallery context. The work is research based and in particular has focused on the essay film as a form that seeks to look at conditions, events and histories in their most expanded form. The Group have exhibited, installed and screened their works nationally and internationally, and are commissioned to develop and exhibit their art works, their research, installations, and publications by a wide range of museums, public and private galleries, biennials, foundations and other bodies.

Sugar Walls Teardom from TABITA REZAIRE on Vimeo.

      Saturday 21 Apr '18 19:00-22:00 hrs
      Stroom Den Haag, Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
      Entrance: free