Posthuman Complicities

“I hear the waters’song” takes place in connection with the exhibition Posthuman Complicities currently on show at xhibit at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna: this exhibition addresses concepts of fluidity, the Atlantic, and the deep seas, seeing the ocean as a location of violence and resistance. The focus of the accompanying program at mumok cinema is on music as a store of colonial history, with a central role taken by the Detroit techno duo Drexciya. In a series of publications and an accompanying mythology, Drexciya reformulated a speculative version of the 1781 massacre on the slave ship Zong, transferring the story to the present day. A large number of filmmakers and artists have drawn on the work of Drexciya. Spirits from the past are conjured up, allowing their voices to be heard in the rhythms of language and song, and in essayistic and simulated moving images. Audre Lorde says: “I hear the waters’ song, feel the tides within the fluids of my body, hear the sea echoing my mother’s voices of survival [...] I hear them resounding inside me from swish to boom – from the dark to the moon of fullness.”

Program

Hannah Black, My Bodies, 2015, 4 min
Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, Finding Fanon Part Two, 2015, 10 min
Paul Maheke, What Flows Through and Across (As the Waters Recall), 2017, 14 min
Akosua Adoma Owusu, Drexciya, 2010, 11 min
The Otolith Group, Hydra Decapita, 2010, 31 min

Presented by Andrea Popelka and Lisa Stuckey, after the screening conversation with Djamila Grandits

Andrea Popelka lives in Berlin. She has a background in cultural studies, and works as an author and curator. She has co-curated exhibitions at ACUD gallery, Berlin, the Phyletisches Museum in Jena, the Animal Anatomy Theater in Berlin, and Kunsthalle Vienna. Popelka is interested in the “art of not being governed like that” (Michel Foucault), and the extent to which this can be applied to a curating of resistance.

Lisa Stuckey lives in Vienna. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. She has participated in exhibitions and screenings at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, mumok cinema, and Künstlerhaus Vienna. Publications among others in Journal for Artistic Research and NEUE kunstwissenschaftliche forschungen.

Djamila Codou Anges Grandits lives in Vienna. Since 2016, she co-directs together with Julia Sternthal this human world - International Human Rights Film Festival. Since 2010, she is engaged in different cultural projects, short and documentary film projects and festivals in fields of production, conception, and set design. Her interests lie in the correlations of arts and theoretical approaches as well as political and activist forms.

The exhibition Posthuman Complicities takes place from March 10 to May 14, 2017, at
xhibit at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.