Bringing together artists from around the world who are attuned to this singular moment in history, The Normal showcases international perspectives, including new ways of working with artists to produce works that respond to the imperatives of sustainability. Crucially, it looks to highlight how our laws, histories and communities are entangled with viruses, ecosystems and each other, foregrounding the role that art plays in envisaging different relationships to worlds that have yet to emerge.
Image: James Webb, There’s No Place Called Home (Edinburgh), 2021. Courtesy Talbot Rice Gallery, photo: Sally Jubb
Based on the results of a questionnaire circulated in Reims and beyond, the artist composed a beer whose flavour relates the respondents’ relationship to social and political engagement. This gastronomic creation, produced in collaboration with SHED/Senses Brewing, will be accompanied by a musical intervention by the artist, who uses sound to decipher and reformulate the scores of stories to be rewritten.
Emeka Ogboh at the Cleveland Museum of Art © The Darkroom Co. 2018
Private and public collections: MRAC Occitanie / Frac nouvelle-aquitaine MéCA / Artothèque du lot
Ali Cherri, The Three Humors, 2017. Collection Frac Nouvelle Aquitaine MÉCA. © droits réservés
THIS IS NOT AFRICA – UNLEARN WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED disrupts a conventional and stereotypical western narrative of Africanness. It includes works that in various ways parody, break through, deconstruct or establish new cognitive parameters and forms of expression. By way of exception, ARoS is going to create an art satellite in close collaboration with the ambitious and artistic powerhouse SCCA and Red Clay in Ghana.
Sammy Baloji, Kasala: The Slaughterhouse of Dreams or the First Human, Bende’s Error, Imane Farès, Paris, 2020. Photo © Tadzio
Organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in collaboration with Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art – Qatar Museums and Qatar Foundation Curated by Manuel Borja-Villel and Abdellah Karroum
Younès Rahmoun, Jabal-Hajar-Turab #9, 2017. Exhibition view: Sharjah Biennial 13, An unpredictable expression of human potential, Beirut Art Center, Beirut. Photo: Marco Pinarelli.
In the framework of the exhibition Kinshasa Chroniques, with Sammy Baloji, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Johan Lagae, and Domonique Malaquais.
Image: Sammy Baloji, The Tower: a Concrete Utopia, inkjet print, 2015.
With reference to three principal works, Sammy Baloji tackles the question of transmission and genealogy by means of the Congolese rumba, the tradition of the kasala and the so-called “Indies” tapestries made at the Gobelins Manufactory between the 17th and 18th centuries. Sammy Baloji is also the author of the visual for the 49th edition of the Festival and created the limited edition 2020 that you will be able to discover on the Festival’s online shop in the autumn. Coproduction Festival d’Automne à Paris. Event organized within the framework of the Africa 2020 Season, in partnership with France Culture.
Image: Sammy Baloji, Ekibondo Court revisited. Photomontage of the installation (fresco) for the exhibition Congo Art Works, Palais des Beaux-Arts (BOZAR), Brussels, October 7, 2016 – January 22, 2017, in collaboration with the Africa Museum. Design and production: Orfée Grandhomme & Ismaël Bennani for Sammy Baloji / Twenty Nine Studio
Stage director Aristide Tarnagda, himself an author and director of the festival Les Récréâtrales in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) where the show was created, invited eight actors from all over Africa, but also from France, to serve Aanza’s lyrical eloquence, to bring the poet’s city to life and experience “the capacity of dreams to rob the world of its misery”. The show, originally designed to be performed outdoors, is recreated here indoors. “Que ta volonté soit Kin”, Éditions Nzoi and Passage(s), libres courts au Tarmac, 2018 (in French). Atelier Berthier, Paris 17e, as part of the Festival d’Automne à Paris and “Africa 2020” season
Ali Cherri participates in the next Kochi-Muziris Biennale, cur. by Shubigi Rao, with a group of sculptures from the series Grafting. Different venues in and around Kochi, India
Image: Ali Cherri, Grafting (I), 2019. Exhibition view: “Phantom Limb”, Jameel Arts Center, Dubai, 2020.