video installation
My child, my child, you will be born,
out of the powder that is my ashes.
And you shall be, child of your mother,
you will not turn away your face.
I will teach you how to smile, but not in service of men.
Show you to be strong, but not in order to dominate.
And if you play the trumpet, it will not be for the battlefield.
In the video installation Phoenix’s Last Song (2019) the viewers are presented with the legend of the paradisiacal bird who descends to earth in order to die. Whilst the sun sets fire to the pyre of twigs on which she lays, the phoenix sings a song to the child that will be born from her ashes. Her words are a call to think and live against the patriarchal, capitalist and colonial power structures that define the world as we know it. The text draws on the work of feminist thinkers like Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Simone de Beauvoir and Emma Goldman, who each look at the ways in which institutions like the bourgeois family, state education, the legal apparatus inscribe the child within these power structures. Against this background, Phoenix’s Last Song opens up a space to imagine how a new world may arise out of a burning of the old. (Original sound of the piece is produced and performed by Sami El-Enany, the voice-over by Emma Bennett)
Dorine van Meel is an artist based between Brussels and Amsterdam who’s practice manifests as video installations, performances and collaborative projects. Her interest in discursive practices, feminist methodologies, and self-organised forms of collaborations is reflected within the collective projects she initiates. www.dorinevanmeel.com
Events
Plural Wombs
Workshops & Performance organized by Dorine van Meel
with Marija Cetinić // 13.9.22 // 20:00-22:00 / online
with Tina Omayemi Reden // 20.9.22 // 20:00-22:00 / online
with Dorine van Meel // 24.9.22 // 14:00-17:00 / alpha nova & galerie futura
+ Performance with all participants (20:00) in the context of the exhibition opening
in English
Please register for the workshops by 5 September and send a short motivation to: mail@alpha-nova-kulturwerkstatt.de
We will inform everyone on 6 September about the selection of participants.
As part of this exhibition Dorine van Meel organizes a new iteration of Plural Wombs, a collaborative project that brings together a number of cultural practitioners working on the subjects of social reproduction, reproductive justice, and the political dimension of parenthood through workshops and performances. For this occasion she has invited lecturer and writer Marija Cetinić and artist and performer Tina Omayemi Reden to each lead a writing workshop in which we will collectively think through some of the following questions:
What radical potential can we aspire, when we live our m/othering practices as a possible action, more than a gendered identity? How might our way of relating change when m/othering – as a queer, radical and collective practice and a communal responsibility for caregiving – becomes imperative to building transformational change?
How can caregiving and mothering un-imagine the child as property, de-naturalize the mother as gendered labourer, and strike against an economy of recognition? What structures of address disengage from the compulsive construction of a nonplural self?
Marija Cetinić is Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and a research affiliate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Her current project, focuses on the concept of saturation, and on developing its implications for the relation of contemporary art and aesthetics to political economy.
Tina Omayemi Reden is a transdisciplinary artist, activist, teacher, cultural and community worker. Her artistic practice employs sound installation, storytelling and performance in an exploration of the potential for communal exchange and transformation.
Claims, Quests & Desires. Around the Table of Future Feminisms
Round-Table & Think Lab with inputs, discussions, dialogues and poster production
with art scholar and author Katy Deepwell (Middlesex University, London; n.paradoxa), curator and author Övül Ö. Durmusoglu (HBK Braunschweig, Istanbul Biennial), cultural scholar and art creator Sarah Held (Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Aufstand der Schwestern) and curator Lorena Juan (COVEN BERLIN, transmediale) and guests.
29.10.2022 // 15:00-18:00
alpha nova & galerie futura
in English
Registration until 22.10.22: mail@alpha-nova-kulturwerkstatt.de
Together we want to address the following questions among others:
What can feminist art “achieve”? What kind of (feminist) art do we want and need in the future and especially against the background of the current political and ecological catastrophes? What new formats and alliances are important to develop? What future forms of exhibition making (collaborative / collective) and (art) mediation are necessary for a paradigm shift? What visions do we need without losing sight of the realities and what potential do formats like manifestos have?
Katy Deepwell is Professor of Contemporary Art, Theory and Criticism at Middlesex University, London. She founded and edited: n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal (1998-2017 at KT press). Recent books include Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms (2020) and 50 Feminist Art Manifestos: An Anthology (2022).
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu is a curator, writer and educator working on the sustainability of intersectional futures. She is co-professor of Art in Discourse in HBK Braunschweig with Dr. Ana Teixeira Pinto.
Sarah Held is a cultural scholar and art creator. She teaches and researches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Feminist interventions and forms of resistance against sexualised violence/femicide are the subject of her research and artistic-activist practice. She co-founded the art collective Aufstand der Schwestern.
Lorena Juan works in her curatorial practice with experimental formats, public space and collaborative processes, using heterogeneous tools from speculative fiction and feminist science fiction. She is co-founder of COVEN BERLIN and part of the transmediale curatorial team.
The exhibition Phoenix’s Last Song takes place as a cooperation project and as part of the transnational exhibition Empowerment (10.9.22-8.1.23) by and at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.
