Mit Alumna Diana Akoto-Yip

Diana Akoto-Yip, Justin Barton and Mark Fisher, Julius von Bismarck, Stephanie Comilang, Jessica Edwards and Nik Nowak, Steve Goodman (aka Kode9), Ayesha Hameed, Fabian Knecht, Mischa Leinkauf, Ella Littwitz, The Otolith Group, Su Yu Hsin (and Angela Goh)

Jan 27, 2024 - Mar 28, 2024
Opening: Jan 27, 2024 | 6-9 pm

Heavy Water | of Coordinates, Containers and Containment is anticipated as a mutational encounter between the participating artists’ exhibited works, asking us to think anew, following the late Édouard Glissant’s ‘aquatic’ theories (1997) and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s conception of a ‘deep or abyssal implicancy’ (2019), of how we might understand these works when reframed, recast, in a poethics of relation, in dialogue with each other. Taking as its indexical register the wet mechanics of both the historical and contemporary global movement of peoples – volitional or enforced – and commodities, of peoples transformed into commodities, Heavy Water | of Containers, Coordinates and Containment considers the entanglements and afterlives of maritime colonial history, racial capitalism, and contemporary hypermodernity: embarkations and disembarkations, promethean fantasies of an imposition of order, containment and mastery of uncharted ‘new worlds’, paralleled with unimaginable dystopian lived nightmares of abduction, dispossession, and displacement; of contestation over borders, exclusion zones and proprietorship of space; dislocation wrought through war, scarcity, persecution, and the acceleration of extreme climate events. Commencing with the conceit of ‘Heavy Water’, its ambivalence and excess of meaning informs the span and framing of the exhibition, interrogating both Real and speculative visual (and sonic) histories and futurities: ‘Heavy Water’, the channel, the sea, the ocean as freighted, weighted with precarious crossings, unsafe passage and untold trauma, and of practices concealing the most egregious extractive processes of capital becomes hauntological, “pregnant with as many dead as living” (Glissant, 1997:6), and where the value of a life is differentially calculated. From the slave ship to the transmodal container and its super cargo container carrier ship, from the colonial plantation to the refugee camp, and from the spectral threat of nuclear ruination to the escape fantasies of the colonisation of outer space, today James Baldwin’s profound and prophetic reflection, “Tomorrow you will all be negroes!” resonates more starkly.