About the project

The exchange project “beyond language” is curated by Eva Seufert and Fouad Asfour in collaboration with the Johannesburg based artist collective Dead Revolutionaries Club (DRC). The project invites artists from South Africa and Germany to collaboratively engage in the creation of a series of exhibitions, workshops, discursive events and interventions which will take place in Johannesburg in February and March and in Berlin in June 2011.

In South Africa, the exhibition “Figures of Speech” will be opened at Jozi Art Lab on 25 February, followed by an artist round table at Hector Pieterson Museum and Memorial in Soweto, a book launch at Keleketla! Library (based in Drill Hall in Johannesburg city centre) and an artist-run writing workshop at Polokwane Art Museum. In Berlin, an exhibition will be opened at the project space for contemporary art after the butcher and artists will present and discuss their work in the interdisciplinary project space Zentrum Kreuzberg, WestGermany.

Participating artists, writers and curators are:
from the DRC: Fouad Asfour, Khwezi Gule, Bandile Gumbi, Sharlene Khan, Amos Letsoalo
from Berlin: Eva Seufert and Ingo Gerken

The project involves participants in reflections on various dimensions of language and communication through dialogue, the creation of works, performances, or interventions. It aims at developing ways of engaging with an audience and stirring its curiosity, for instance in discursive events, workshops or book launches, thus shaping situations where the performative, enunciative and poetic facility of language interact and open up new spaces of creating art. The way how the project goes about doing this is being developed in the course of its progress.

Language is at the centre of human experiences and practises. While language is the basic means of human interaction – through the use of speech in communication – it also is the basis for individual experiences. Language as means of exchange is thus located in both the private and public realm and a mediator between the internal and external; between ideas, expectations and action taken, thus playing a pivotal role when bodies are set in movement. The project aims at opening up questions such as: How is the language of emotions, of needs and desires turned into phrases? How does experience dislocate meaning across the body, transgressing and deviating from familiar paths, thus changing any unfolding chain? The project aims to study the movement that occurs between present awareness, memory and imagination, the moment before a word transmutes and becomes a name, the process how phrases gather familiarity and gain subjective significance, when expressions change from description to meaning as they are submitted to the subconsciousness.

Apart from these reflections, the project addresses the relation between text and image, the translatability of verbal and visual perception and how this relation influences the reappearance of the repressed which eludes verbalisation in images. Based on a work-in-progress approach, the project invites participating artists to elicit a wide range of aspects and questions while working in the different phases and places of the project. Allowing for an open and process-oriented format, artists are asked to find out how to approach and negotiate these issues not only in exhibitions of their works but also in conversation events and workshops.

"beyond language" is supported by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen IfA and the Berlin Senate Cultural Affairs Department.