2023-11-29 | Jabu Arnell in a group exhibition Delay and Encounters and/or Other Proximate Unknowns by Nothing Gets Organised and Foundation for Contemporary Art - Ghana
We are very excited to share that our fellow Jabu Arnell is a part of a group exhibtion Delay and Encounter and/or Other Proximate Unknowns in FCA–Ghana, curated by our fellow Sinethemba Twalo, organised by Nothing Gets Organised, Foundation Contemporary Art Ghana and OtherNetwork.
Grappling with a certain intimate disorganisation within the conditions of the Black Outside, the curatorial project ‘Delay and Encounter and/or Other Proximate Unknowns’ brings together six artistic positions that think about sonicity and Black study, built environments and spatial discourse, ecologies, processes of collectivity and archiving. From this vantage point, outside denotes a particular spatio-temporal disposition. The Black Outside can thus be understood as a paradoxical assemblage of malleable and contingent forms of being, doing, occupying, and inhabiting.
Speculating with and alongside the figure of W.E.B. Du Bois, the exhibition is configured around three reparative propositions imagined as blueprints for a poetics of the imminent unknown:
A Collective Assemblage of Enunciation
Affirmative Sabotage as Method
Feeling for the Wall after Collapse
The project includes responses from internationally-based artists and collectives including Ola Hassanain, Jabu Arnell, Nii Noi Nortey, Luana Vitra, Natalie Paneng and ROOM19ISAFACTORY. ‘Delay and Encounter and/or Other Proximate Unknowns’ is curated by Sinethemba Twalo for Nothing Gets Organised – NGO (Johannesburg, South Africa) in conversation with the Foundation for Contemporary Art Ghana. The project is initiated within the context of OtherNetwork, a collaborative project that connects independent art spaces worldwide. Curated by Sinethemba Twalo.
FCA-GHANA BIO
Foundation for Contemporary Art–Ghana (FCA–Ghana) is an active network of artists created to offer a platform for the presentation, development and promotion of contemporary art in Ghana. It is a non-profit space that functions as a laboratory, aimed at investigating new positions of curatorial thought and artistic practice in relation to contemporary art on the African continent. Programmes at FCA–Ghana encourage dialogue, experimentation and exploration of art, politics, culture, and traditions. Through these avenues, they aspire to develop and expand as they collaborate with a growing network of artists and art organisations at local, regional and international levels. FCA–Ghana organises exhibitions, seminars, workshops and issues publications to engender a nuanced perspective on contemporary art and artists in Ghana, mainly through its Library and Project Space. FCA–Ghana also functions as a fluid entity that lends itself to transformations in response to specific project ideas, occasionally extending beyond its physical boundaries through local and international collaborations.
NGO BIO
Operating in downtown Johannesburg for the past seven years, Nothing Gets Organised (NGO) has attempted to administer an alternative to the current structures practitioners work within in the context of Johannesburg. Noting the contingent nature of our present, their programming attempts to be a dialogical encounter between now and another time. Understanding the future as plural and disparate encounters with both a past not yet passed, and the present as it reveals itself or remains hidden, NGO embraces the future unknown as a premise that might yield another possibility. The platform was founded in 2016 by Dineo Seshee Bopape, Gabi Ngcobo and Sinethemba Twalo. NGO is interested in unconventional processes of self-organising – those that do not imply structure, tangibility, context or form. It is a space for (NON)SENSE where (NON)SENSE can profoundly gesticulate towards, dislodge, embrace, disavow, or exist as nothing! Research is ongoing, malleable and open-ended. NGO pursues that which becomes publicly visible, to which they confer context, name and identity.
OTHERNETWORK
OtherNetwork is a new type of cultural institution dedicated to give visibility to independent art spaces worldwide. Guided by a belief that self-organised projects offer urgent counter-narratives to larger institutions, OtherNetwork centres around an online platform that connects these project spaces with artists, curators and cultural producers. As a decentralised project, OtherNetwork hosts an international cultural programme of offline events, exhibitions and conversations across Africa, Europe and Latin America. In addition, OtherNetwork also commissions and publishes original editorial content, aiming to build a discourse on what independent cultural production means in different localities.
Exhibition dates: 24.11.2023 – 14.01.2024
Venue: W.E.B. Dubois Centre, 1st Circular Road-Cantonment, Accra