20.-23.5.2013

After its outstanding debut last year, this new edition of the series BLACK EUROPE BODY POLITICS is expanding with live performances and an all-day screening commemorating Malcolm X’s birthday at the Hackesche Höfe Kino.

DECOLONIZING THE „COLD“ WAR is the first Afropean performance showcase and will be accompanied by roundtable discussions on the aesthetic legacy of the Black Power movement in the radical imagination of Diaspora artists. Parallel to this, its influence in liberation and decolonization struggles in the Global South during the so-called „Cold“ War will be approached from the continuities of coloniality. According to Enrique Dussel, a liberation philosopher and decolonial thinker, this war was never „cold“ in the Global South.

We are witnessing a kind of global revivalism on documentary material on the Black Power movement (a good example is the release (2011) of Black Power Mixtape 1967‒1975, by Göran Olsson) and dozens of seminars and conferences are mushrooming all over Europe on the so called „Cold“ War. In these hegemonic narratives the global South is usually considered as a mere recipient of Western imperialism.

During this festival, the story will be told from the perspective of the self-affirmation of Black Power. The emblematic figure of Angela Davis created a planetary movement of solidarity that went beyond the term „Black Internationalism“. These narratives of re-existence will be analyzed in relation to Frantz Fanon´s fundamental role in global South liberation struggles during that period. His interactions with Jean-Paul Sartre will be the focus of some of these unprecedented debates. The worldwide solidarities resulting from the Black Power movement united people beyond racialization and political agendas. BE.BOP 2013 celebrates a paradigm shift that transformed the Black Body into a source of inspiration and beauty prevalent until today.

With Artwell Cain, Vaginal Davis, Teresa María Díaz Nerio, Gabriele Dietze, Simmi Dullay, Moritz Ege, Jeannette Ehlers, Jihan El Tahri, Cecilia Gärding, Quinsy Gario, Adler Guerrier, Neil Kenlock, Grada Kilomba, Adetoun Küppers-Adebisi, Karen Mckinnon, Raúl Moarquech Ferreira Balanquet, Mekonnen Mesghena, Dannys Montes de Oca, Ingrid Mwangi Robert Hutter, Pascale Obolo, Horace Ové, Robbie Shilliam, Muna shirwa, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, Caecilia Tripp, Rolando Vázquez.

Performances

Montag, 20. Mai 2013 | Book Ticket
20.00‒20.45 Uhr: Hommage à Sara Bartman + Teresa María Díaz Nerio
21.00‒22.00 Uhr: Mariposa Ancestral Memory + Raúl Moarquech Ferrera Balanquet
Dienstag, 21. Mai 2013 | Book Ticket
20.00‒21.30 Uhr: Canned Goat + Quinsy Gario + Muna Shirwa

Mittwoch, 22. Mai 2013 | Book Ticket
20.00‒21.30 Uhr: Lacunae + Ingrid Mwangi Robert Hutter
21.15‒22.00 Uhr: Surprise! + Jeannette Ehlers
Donnerstag, 23. Mai 2013 | Book Ticket
22.30‒24.00 Uhr: Sassafras, Cypress & Indigo ‒ Vaginal Davis, Black Screen Images and the Notion of Freakiness + Vaginal Davis

ARTISTS BIOGS

Vaginal Davis is an American genderqueer performing artist, painter, independent curator, composer and writer. Davis‘ name is a homage to activist Angela Davis. This gender-queer, art-music icon made her first appearances in Los Angeles’s club scene. She champions terrorist drag, a performance aesthetic brusquely interrupting the cultural assimilation of commercial or mainstream drag characteristics.
http://www.vaginaldavis.com/

Teresa María Díaz Nerio is a Dominican visual and performance artist and researcher living in Amsterdam. She graduated as a Bachelor in Fine Arts from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (2007) and received her Master in Fine Arts from the Dutch Art Institute (2009). She researches subjects informed by the history of colonial and neocolonial invasions in the Global South and challenges the hegemonic Western notions of identity. http://teresadiaznerio.wordpress.com/

Jeannette Ehlers studied at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and The Funen Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen. Her works explore the Danish enslavement trade and colonialism worldwide through digitally manipulated photographs and video installations.
http://www.jeannetteehlers.dk/

Jihan El Thari is an Egyptian-born, French filmmaker, author and news correspondent. She has authored, directed and produced award-winning documentary films, authored books and reported on political conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. Jihan is a Member of the Executive Bureau of FEPACI (Federation of Pan-African Cinema) and Secretary General of The Guilde of African filmakers in the Diaspora. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Political Science and a Master of Arts Degree in Political Science, both from the American University in Cairo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jihan_El-Tahri/

Cecilia Gärding is the leader of Cultural Heritage Agents, a project that gives Swedish youth with a foreign background the possibility to analyze the impact of ethnic relations on a variety of art-forms. Via this project, Gärding has contributed to a report advising the 2015 Swedish minister of Culture on cultural diversity policies.http://www.muzicadelic.se/

Quinsy Gario is a spoken word performer and is currently following the MA program Comparative Women‘s Studies in Culture and Politics at the Gender Studies Department of the University of Utrecht. He makes art under the banner of NON EMPLOYEES.
http://www.nonemployees.com/

Adler Guerrier was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and lives and works in Miami. Subsequent to studies at the New World School of the Arts in Miami, Florida, Guerrier has exhibited at the Miami Art Museum and the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Using a wide variety of media, he improvises between form and function to nimbly subvert space and time in constructions of racialization, ethnicity and class. He calls upon the democratizing nature of collage and the authority of formal composition to write a contemporary identity critique.
http://www.davidcastillogallery.com/adler-guerrier/

Raúl Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet, Havana, Cuba, 1958, is annterdisciplinary artist, writer And Fulbright scholar. He gained an MFA in Multimedia and Video Art at the University of Iowa in 1992. He has curated major media art exhibits in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Cuba and Mexico, among them InteractivA’ 01 and InteractivA’03 for the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACAY) in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico. Currently a PhD Candidate at the Romance Studies Department, Duke University.
http://vimeo.com/user1111761

Karen D. McKinnon is an American filmmaker based in London, where she attended Gold- smiths College. She wrote Dance/Art, for PBS network and was selected for an emerging dir- ectors fellowship at Columbia Pictures. She developed a passion for filmic installation after collaborating with artists at the experimental college Santa Monica Art and Design. Her work has been funded by the UK Film Council and shown at the Arnolfini, Galerie Ecole des Beaux Arts,Paris, consonni, Spain and in festivals and galleries across Europe and America.
http://vimeo.com/31192998

Ingrid Mwangi and Robert Hutter, as a couple, propose to be a single artist, making video, photo and performance works exploring the Black body in the West. Mwangi Hutter lives and works in Ludwigshafen, Germany and Nairobi, Kenya. Solo exhibitions include: ‚aradise: the Hidden Land, Zeitraumexit, Mannheim, Germany, 2011-12; Ingrid Mwangi Robert Hutter. Constant Triumph, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, 2011.
http://www.ingridmwangi.de/ingrid_mwangi_robert_hutter/home.html

Horace Ové is a British filmmaker, photographer, painter and writer with Trinidadian roots. He is one of the leading Black independent film-makers of the post-war period. For his film Pressure, he holds the Guinness World Record for being the first Black British film-maker to direct a feature-length film. Ové has built a prolific and sometimes controversial career as a filmmaker, documenting racism and the Black Power movement in Britain over many decades through photography and in films such as Baldwin’s Nigger (1968), Pressure and Dream to Change the World (2003).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Ov%C3%A9

Pascale Obolo was born in Yaoundé in Cameroon in 1967, and lives and works in Paris. She studied directing at the Conservatoire Libre du cinema Français and obtained a Master of Cinéma at the Paris VIII University. Her films centralize the feminine Hip Hop movement in the French suburbs as well as the place of the Black woman in the cultural industries. She is the chief editor of the online art journal Afrikadaa and was awarded a silver medal at FESPACO 2013 for her documentary Calypso Rose.
http://www.calypso-at-dirty-jims.com/biography-pascale-obolo.html

Muna Shirwa is a singer, poet, writer, actress, performer and theatermaker from Amsterdam. She represents soulful power in her word-music and honest rawness in her voice and her eclectic ‘I am not afraid to speak up’ attitude. Making poetic noise to feel alive is just as important to her as guarding her dreams from going abstract.

Caecilia Tripp is an artist, filmmaker and researcher, alternating between Paris, New York and Berlin. Using video installation, photography and performance, her work explores the imaginaries of transgression of social and cultural boundaries. Her work deals with forms of freedom, utopia and civil disobedience and shines a light on the invention of new languages, sounds and cultural codes as a permanent process of “making history”. She is currently col- laborating with the Young Lords in New York City.
http://caeciliatripp.com/