Around the Centre #1
Saturday 07 Jul 2018 from 4pm to 8pm
Performance de Ligia Lewis, Paul Maheke, Nkisi et Titilayo Adebayo à l'occasion de la journée Autour du Centre #1, 7 juillet 2018
© Pierre Antoine
With Titilayo Adebayo, Danielle Dean, Paul Maheke, Nkisi, Maboula Soumahoro, NON Worldwide DJ set.
This highlight of the exhibition Le centre ne peut tenir in Lafayette Anticipations’ Agora gathers three participating artists - Danielle Dean, Paul Maheke, and Nkisi - and their collaborators around a program conceived in complement to their new productions. Together, they tackle themes of representation, beyond categories of race and gender, subject-making or even strategies of disidentification and protection, such as translucence.
The evening begins with a conversation between Danielle Dean and Maboula Soumahoro, professor and founder of Black History Month in France, regarding Dean’s participatory film. Maboula Soumahoro was a key interlocutor in this project that attempts to deconstruct the racial dynamics attached to objects of consumption as well as their implicit class and gender biases. Dean and Soumahoro will engage in a dialogue on the artistic and discursive processes of Bazar, tackling the larger themes of construction and deconstruction of roles.
The second part of the evening is a choreographed performance by Ligia Lewis in collaboration with Paul Maheke, and preformed by Titilayo Adebayo to a rhythm composed by Nkisi. Concise repetitive gestures, mumbled words akin to spells being cast, ambiguous objects, ghostly shadows and long echoes serve as strategies to build a poetic, ambiguous and penetrating space, oscillating between the visible and the erased. The performance will be followed by a DJ set by Nkisi, inviting the audience to join their movements to those of the performers.
Evening programme:
6 PM: Conversation between Danielle Dean and Maboula Soumahoro
8 PM: Performance by Ligia Lewis, Paul Maheke, Nkisi and Titilayo Adebayo
8:30 PM: DJ set by Nkisi
Access free of charge for all.
The evening begins with a conversation between Danielle Dean and Maboula Soumahoro, professor and founder of Black History Month in France, regarding Dean’s participatory film. Maboula Soumahoro was a key interlocutor in this project that attempts to deconstruct the racial dynamics attached to objects of consumption as well as their implicit class and gender biases. Dean and Soumahoro will engage in a dialogue on the artistic and discursive processes of Bazar, tackling the larger themes of construction and deconstruction of roles.
The second part of the evening is a choreographed performance by Ligia Lewis in collaboration with Paul Maheke, and preformed by Titilayo Adebayo to a rhythm composed by Nkisi. Concise repetitive gestures, mumbled words akin to spells being cast, ambiguous objects, ghostly shadows and long echoes serve as strategies to build a poetic, ambiguous and penetrating space, oscillating between the visible and the erased. The performance will be followed by a DJ set by Nkisi, inviting the audience to join their movements to those of the performers.
Evening programme:
6 PM: Conversation between Danielle Dean and Maboula Soumahoro
8 PM: Performance by Ligia Lewis, Paul Maheke, Nkisi and Titilayo Adebayo
8:30 PM: DJ set by Nkisi
Access free of charge for all.
Conversation between Danielle Dean and Maboula Soumahoro during Around the Centre #1, July 7, 2018
© Pierre Antoine
Performance by Ligia Lewis, Paul Maheke, Nkisi and Titilayo Adebayo during Around the Centre #1, July 7, 2018
© Pierre Antoine
DJ set by Nkisi during Around the Centre #1, July 7, 2018
© Pierre Antoine
Through a varied and often collaborative body of work comprising performance, installation, sound and video, Maheke considers the potential of the body as an archive in order to examine how memory and identity is formed and constituted. The artist studied at the École nationale supérieure d’arts in Cergy and at Open School East, London/ Margate.
Previous solo exhibitions include: Acqua Alta, Galerie Sultana, Paris; What Flows Through and Across, Assembly Point, London; In Me Everything is Already Flowing, Center, Berlin (all 2017); and I Lost Track of the Swarm, South London Gallery (2016).
Selected group exhibitions include: Ten Days Six Nights, Tate Modern, London; Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale, Italy; Posthuman Complicities, Akademie der Künste, Vienna (all 2017); Slope-tend-big, Grand Union, Birmingham; and Ways of Living, David Roberts Art Foundation, London (all 2016). In 2018 Chisenhale Gallery (London, UK) will present his first major solo presentation in a UK institution.
British-American artist of Nigerian descent, Danielle Dean studied Fine Art at Central St Martins in London and received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She has been a Whitney Independent Study Program Fellow in New York and is an alum of the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Dean currently teaches at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Detroit.
Her work focuses on deconstructing commercial narratives, branding and advertising strategies that often play a role in the construction of the self. She examines commercial images and languages that vehicle ideologies and shape subjectivities, while attempting to unravel their power structures. Often this material (from Nollywood-style soap operas, animation movies, slogans from commercials and political speeches) are rearticulated and combined to critical effect in video works and multimedia installations (www.danielledean.art).
Recent solo exhibitions include True Red Ruin at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2018), and a shoe, a phone, a castle at Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles (2017). Danielle Dean’s work was featured in recent group exhibitions such as It Can Howl at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2016), Shifters at Art in General in New York (2016), and Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2014). Her film True Red Ruin (Elmina Castle) was presented this year at the Artist’s film international at The Whitechapel Gallery in London. Later this year, her work will be presented in a group exhibition in Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.