Announcements

With contributions from Kondo Heller, Akinbode Akinbiyi, Amira Zarari, Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç, Arijit Bhattacharyya, Bruna Barros and Jess Oliveira, Alice Yuan Zhang, Sara Ehsan, Carla Abiles, Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu, Jumoke Adeyanju and you … | Digital Platform | Launch event on November 13, 2022 at Oyoun | www.ronginshagor.com 

Being a common term in Bengali, “rongin shagor রঙিন সাগর” translates to “colorful ocean” – the ocean as a holder of memories: Our bodies as holders of memories, which puts us in direct relation to bodies of water.

“Will you remember to keep us afloat ?” – in turn – proposes a question at the ocean that gives and takes and creates a parallel to how and who shapes memory in our world. Who stays afloat and is remembered to stay afloat? Who will be devoured by tides and forced to be forgotten?

Starting with a poem by Afro-German poet May Ayim, Oyouns new artistic intervention rongin shagor reflects on cultures of memory by exploring the reflective and generative threads of cultural formations located in the senses of the oppressed body. Retracing and reweaving these threads are the incessant tasks of cultures that faced colonialism. Collective memory emerges from language and patterns of collective memory influence language as socially and culturally shared narrative genres. The project attempts to form a constellation of remembrance by interweaving cultural responses and transnational dialogue. This multimodal space will create a rupture between voice and silence, the oral and the visual and an attempt towards the survival of the sensory cultures in the world today.

Taking the shape of a virtual artistic chain letter, rongin shagor is investigating the concept of heritage by getting others involved in the discourse of how our history shapes our actions today. A number of multidisciplinary and multilingual artists will respond to the poem “community” by May Ayim, a progressive thinker and key figure that shaped the Afro- German movement until her untimely death in 1996.

rongin shagor – the colorful ocean – hereby symbolizes the variety of poetic and artistic interpretations and inspirations that emerge from one poem. They float, embark, collide and buoy in the same place, each marking approaches to respective struggles in identity politics. Dreams, visions, and associative powers of imagination in poetry are heightened through a collective growth of individual artworks that build on each other – starting with the aforementioned poem by May Ayim. Responses to her work by interdisciplinary artists will shape rongin shagor while setting the way for further participation.

The erasure caused by coloniality with the parallel narrative during the pandemic challenges us to face realities of loss, loss of connection, loss of oral tradition, loss of ritual, loss of loved ones, loss of physical touch, loss of justice. In all this loss, there is a need to create a collective shared space, where challenges faced by different diaspora communities in Berlin and beyond are made visible and heard. This digital/online participatory project will attempt to create a hub of knowledge through art and bring it to a wider community to experience the space and get engaged in the discourses over time.

Being a mainly digital project with manifestations in the physical space, this body of work looks at the broader interactions between European nations and the societies they colonised by dealing with issues of identity, language, representation, displacement, migration, resistance and agency. The artistic responses will be shared both on- and offline, culminating on a digital platform, which is due to launch later this year and which will be accompanied by a physical “opening” event at May-Ayim Ufer and Oyoun in Berlin.

“A Childhood story from the dark” will be shown in Centrum Kultury Zamek at Poznan within the curated Anti War Coalition Project program between 25. 10 – 31. 10. 2022.

Detailed information can be found here.

Angelus Altera
Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu
SALT Beyoğlu
Part I: 11.00-14.30; Part II: 14.30-18.00

“His face is Our faces are turned toward the past. Where we you perceive a chain of events, he sees we see one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his our feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. We, actually go there, summon the ghosts, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. We have taken the storm blowing from the heavens into our wings and it is so powerful that these wings will never close up. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. In the storm and with the power granted by the ghosts from the pile of debris rising to the skyward, we are now building the future.”1

1 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu & Natis fka. Hasan Aksaygın

Taking its departure from the 90s archive of Turkey’s performance-art history, “Angelus Altera” addresses the relationality between the notions of heritage and future. To understand the ever-changing borders and boundaries of the 90s, the performance first looks to the 80s and navigates by drawing analogies between Turkey’s general socio-politics, Queer history, and performance art history.

From a Queer perspective, “Angelus Altera” investigates the hegemonic history, past and present by focusing on the notions of visibility & invisibility, (op)pressure & ease, (en)closure & opening/coming out through the body and opens itself to the future.

Realized in collaboration with Performistanbul and with the support of monoco.io, the performance will take place on Sunday, September 18 between 11.00-18.00 at Salt Beyoğlu on floors – 1 and 1. This free-admission program is open to everyone.

Costume Designer: Mert Yemenicioğlu
Advisor: Simge Burhanoğlu
Acknowledgements: Ali Emir Tapan, Natis fka. Hasan Aksaygın, Must Kika, İsmail İnan, Ayşe Gülru Sarpel

Materials such as glitter and sand to be used during the performance may be inconvenient for those with respiratory sensitivity.

Lick the scar, enter the wound
Sunday, 4 September
5pm
33 min.
Tropez, Berlin

“Lick the scar, enter the wound” is a 33 minutes long investigation of a usually-long-durational-performance-artist on what is residing in Queer body from the Global South in the sense of vulnerability and strength. By combining oriental and queer aesthetics and employing ritualistic movement dynamics, the performance questions embodied resistance strategies against conservative, cis-heteropatriarchal repressive regimes as well as attempts to break down the exoticization and fetishisation of the Global Southern Queerness.

From 11 to 28 August, Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu participates in the CAMP Notes on Art Education program as part of documentafifteen. Darıcıoğlu will be there with an approach centring on care as a ground for building radical politics and a scope to look at the notions of vulnerability and strength of marginalized bodies.

As far as I can carry, as long as I can hold
6 hours
With Michael(a) Daoud
At STAMP Festival Hamburg as part of Altonale
2 July 22 – 14:45-20:45
Platz der Republik

“As Far As I Can Carry, As Long As I Can Hold” is a long durational performance that is an invitation to the moving journey of the performers’ layers of intimacy. Starting from questioning how we can overcome the fear of being intimate with others, especially in the time of post-covid and step over virtual love behind device screens. To further question queer intimacy, vulnerability, strength, communication and power dynamics.
How can we connect when the whole world assigns us roles?

https://www.altonale.de/veranstaltungen/michaela-daoud-und-leman-sevda-daricioglu/ 

We Begin To Seek Out…
June 24 – July 16, 2022
Opening on Friday, June 24 from 19.00 to 22.00
Performances on Saturday, June 25 at 11.30 and 21.15

Ahlam Shibli | Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu | Milena Bonilla | Rubiane Maia | SAP LAB (Paz Ortúzar & Lucy

Cordes Engelman) with Bernardita Bennett

While the words dirt and soil are often used synonymously, soil implies a depth in content that dirt seems somehow to lack. Dirt, meanwhile, evokes an unseemliness that describes words of insult or behaviors of indelicacy. A popular gardening website, for instance, differentiates the two as follows: soil is the substance that makes plants grow, dirt is what we get on our clothes and under our fingernails. In other words, whatever makes up the thin layer of stuff that covers our planet, upon which our towns, cities, and lives are built, into which our dead are buried, soil is good, dirt is bad, even though its material constitution may all be the same — a composite of decaying matter.

Perhaps because of all its implied virtues, soil has famously been co-opted into nationalist and xenophobic rhetorics, as if soil itself can bespeak whatever arbitrary characteristics a border inscribes. This exhibition is thus organized in defense of dirt. It brings together seven artists who give language to this defense through photography, performance, video, and textual intervention. The artists in the exhibition all live and work in Europe, having emigrated from different parts of the world. In a place that had notoriously called upon soil to exercise politics of intolerance, and still uses dirt as a denigration in broad, bigoted strokes, this exhibition is not just a defense of dirt, but also a rejection of the pristine, the mythology of immutable landscapes and nostalgic natures.

On the occasion of SAP Space’s inaugural exhibition, we begin a series of beginnings — beginnings born out of rewrites and excerpts, impulsive starts and productive failures, private ruminations and political urgencies — all the messy processes that dirty our hands and soil our clothes. The object of what “we” seek is intentionally imprecise and slippery, because the material in question — some call it soil, some call it dirt, some call it decay — is meaningful precisely because it is ever-changing.

The exhibition will be open to the public on Saturdays from 12.00 to 18.00 for the duration of the exhibition, or by appointment.

“A Childhood Tale From The Dark” got an invitation from Tatiana Kochubinskaya to take part of Antiwar Coalition Art.
You can see the video through the link here.

“My burden is my soulmate” is going to be at Ornamenta24 Pre-exhibition May version. The performance will take place at the entrance of Stadt Museum Pforzheim on 13 May, from 19:00. This time, Leman Sevda Daricioglu collaborates with Firat Yildiz, a local sound artist for the sound installation of the live performance.