Please join us for the opening of Manuel Sékou’s I Lost My Gems exhibition.

22 September 2023
from 7.00pm

Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68
10997 Berlin
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After the heist of historical jewellery and art objects out of the Green Vault in Dresden, the case has been reported worldwide. The reports and narrations around spectacular incident quickly drifted into peculiar vocabulary, provoking projections and prejudices against the city of Dresden and its citizens. The discrepancy between personal experience and conveyed attributions about Dresden do manifest the initial point of the project I LOST MY GEMS. Manuel Sékou– raised in Dresden and the artist behind the venture – directs his perspective back to his hometown and youth within the years of the 2000-10s, to confront dynamics of the inner-German history in relation to his own socialization and thus to carve out dispositions of socio-political patterns of behavior induced by collective uncertainty: interference of adolescence with shadows a collapsed system…Sampling in parallel to the investigations of the Soko Epaulette(special commision) the project seeks for treasures of memory and collects potential pieces of evidence of hidden symptoms of the past in the present.To decode the X-Factor of Dresden beyond the mediated image through the mode of visual language.

https://ilostmygems.net
https://instagram.com/i_lost_my_gems
https://ilostmygems.bandcamp.com

Browse I Lost My Gems here

À la mort de son père, Juif d’Oran naturalisé français puis israélien, Ariella Azoulay découvre dans un document que sa grand-mère portait le prénom Aïcha. En deux récits mêlant autobiographie et théorie politique, l’autrice serpente entre les catalogues de bijoux, les photos trouvées et les collections d’objets pillés, pour déployer par fragments l’histoire de sa famille et mettre en parallèle les colonialismes français en Algérie et sioniste en Palestine. Entre ces projets impériaux, elle saisit bien des continuités, à commencer par la volonté obstinée de détruire l’enchevêtrement séculaire des mondes juifs, arabes et berbères, un entrelacs qu’elle revendique pour mieux le restaurer.

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Ariella Aïsha Azoulay est écrivaine, chercheuse, cinéaste expérimentale et commissaire d’archives anticoloniales. Née en 1962 dans la colonie sioniste de Palestine, elle est professeure à l’université Brown où elle enseigne la théorie politique, la résistance aux formations impériales et les imaginaires anticoloniaux réclamant le retour, la restitution et le tikkoun olam, la réparation du monde. Autrice d’une dizaine de livres parus dans de nombreux pays, elle a publié entre autres Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019) et From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation (Pluto Press, 2011). Inédit, La Résistance des bijoux est son premier livre traduit en français.

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“Healing The Museum” is a mid-career monograph looking at Grace Ndiritu’s diverse practice over the last twenty years, which encompasses performance, film, shamanism, social actions, painting, publications, textile work, and collection research. The large selection of artworks included in the publication are in a dialogue with each other, further enriched by in-depth conversations with Brook Andrew, Gareth Bell-Jones, and Philippe Van Cauteren, and written contributions from Ifeanyi Awachie, Ann Hoste, and Hammad Nasar. The monograph’s publication coincides with the eponymous exhibition at S.M.A.K.–Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent.

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The question that motivates this issue is simple: how come so many of us outside the settler colony called the United States of America, are so deeply influenced by and interpret our own contexts through the political ‘software’ created by U.S.-based academics and activists? The goal here is less to disqualify this U.S. political framework, than to demonstrate that the successful ways through which it analyzes its own context may not be as useful when analyzing other situations. Throughout the issue, we aim to reflect on U.S. exceptionalism, including in its own anti-imperialist critique (Zoé Samudzi), on what Blackness misses when it is mostly centered on African American espitemologies (Cases Rebelles), on transfused U.S.-forged concepts of “brownness” or “BIPOC” (Sinthujan Varatharajah), on illusory attempts to translate struggles into (U.S.) English (Bekriah Mawasi), on the complete blind spot casteism constitutes in this U.S. ‘software’ (Shaista Aziz Patel & Vijeta Kumar), on the need for a pluriversal approach of queerness (Rahul Rao)… Even within the U.S., the political framework that categorizes all people (from Indigenous people to white settlers) coming from the south of its border as “Latinx” needs to be problematized as settler colonial creations (Floridalma Boj Lopez). With this issue, we aim at doing just that: not letting go of the precious epistemologies U.S.-based thinkers have brought us, but simply decentering them to favor the pluriversality of our influences.

The cover was created for us by Michael DeForge and the News from the Fronts section brings us reflections on Taiwan (Szu-Han Ho & Meng-Yao Chuang), Cameroon (Ethel-Ruth Tawe), the Ainu (Kanako Uzawa) and Fusako Shigenobu’s political legacy, a few weeks before her release from prison in Japan (May Shigenobu).

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