LATEST NEWS
April
Rethinking Cultural Interactions in Visual Art
Conference on April 15-16, 2024 at University of Copenhagen
This conference focuses on the transcultural turn in art history by examining its theoretical, methodological, and analytical potentials and limits. Transcultural approaches aim to broaden the notion of “art” by proposing new frameworks for understanding the complex flows of people, objects, and ideas that circulate around the globe.
Conference on April 15-16, 2024 at University of Copenhagen.
Read more and sign up before April 1 at: https://artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/research/tram/events/rethinking-transcultural-interactions-in-visual-art/
Contact Information:Gunhild Borggreen, Associate Professor, gunhild@hum.ku.dk
FEBRUARY
Public Art Video Installation:
Dikenga – Four Faces of the Sun
February 23 – March 1, 2024, 6:00–10:00 p.m.
Location: John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Fisk University
1000 17th Ave N, Nashville, TN 37208
Reception: February 23, 2024
5:00-7:00 p.m.
Featuring artist Michelle EISTRUP, Artistic Fellow at the John Lewis Center for Social Justice.
DIKENGA – FOUR FACES OF THE SUN
A PUBLIC ART LARGE-SCALE OUTDOOR VIDEO INSTALLATION
A community-centered and research-driven collaborative effort
- exploring the Bakongo philosophy regarding gentleness, openness, strength, and resilience
- revitalizing a language embodied in gestures often found in the living artifacts, niombos and nkisi’s trapped in museum collections
- celebrating an African-American heritage that transmits real social and aesthetic values
- highlighting the significance of spirituality at the facade of a primary place of gathered knowledge
- representing a circular and transitional journey of human life, from which all can take inspiration
Produced with the support of the Schusterman Foundation, the University Galleries and the Discipline of Art, Fisk University, and the Danish Arts Council.
Four Faces of the Sun is part of the Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice (EADJ) at Vanderbilt University’s 2022/2023 program, Artistic Activism and the Power of Collective Resistance, curated by Selene Wendt.
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/eadj/four-faces-of-the-sun/
For inquiries about this event, please write Lakesha Moore at Fisk University Galleries: lmoore@fisk.edu
Dec 2023
Mindelact
It is the main theatrical event in Cape Verde and currently the most important theatrical event in all of Lusophone Africa. It is now considered the most important theater event in West Africa.
https://www.mindelact.org/festival-mindelact
October 2023
Southnord x Kulturhuset welcomes you to join us for the inaugural Southnord Artfest, a triennial in the making. This edition, hosted by Kulturhuset in Stockholm brings together some of the Nordics’ foremost contemporary artists, some hidden gems and legendary forerunners. Their common denominator is their African heritage and their Nordic context, which they use to examine what it means to be a complex and multifaceted human being. The artfest takes place between 26 October 2023 and 14 January 2024.
The works in the exhibition include photography, video installations, painting, tapestry, sculpture, a sonic piece and a living archive. The artists each straddling two or more cultural spaces that give them unique and multiple simultaneous perspectives, as they tell stories that often go untold; juxtapose experiences that often exist in parallel; centre histories that are often in the margin. Through their work they begin to fill in the gaps in our common history, chronicling and bearing witness for the muted and the voiceless.
September 2023
The international group exhibition Seeds and Souls proposes new explorations into the connections between botanical histories and the movement of plants through reclaiming traditional knowledge, revisiting colonial legacies and contemporary diasporic experiences.
Presented at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, which was built in the late 19th century on the grounds of Copenhagen’s then botanical garden, the exhibition draws parallels between original soil and vegetation – their extraction, consumption, transplantation, and mutation into new environments – and the phenomena of cultural dispersions anchored within histories that continue to impact us today.
The participating artists reflect on these questions through various forms of tangible and immaterial excavations, the uncovering of overlooked and sometimes contentious histories, and through ‘re-rooting’ as a way of reclaiming agency over these histories and cultural expressions. Visitors can look forward to encounter large scale and sculptural textile installations, video and mixed media pieces, as well as paintings.
Participating artists: Brook Andrew, Shiraz Bayjoo, Sonia Boyce, Ishita Chakraborty, Annalee Davis, Michelle Eistrup, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Linda Lamignan, Yvon Ngassam.
Seeds and Souls is curated by Christine Eyene, Lecturer in Contemporary Art at Liverpool John Moores University and Research Curator at Tate Liverpool.
The exhibition is supported by the Augustinus Foundation, the Danish Arts Foundation, the Obel Family Foundation, the Aage og Johanne Louis-Hansens Foundation.
Yvon-Ngassam-Untitled-Lolodorf-2021-22-Courtesy-the-Artist-and-Bikoka-Art-Project
August 2023
'The String of Lineage will not be Broken'. Screening of video produced at Fisk. Presented by Osei Bonsu, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art of Africa, Tate Modern.
https://www.biennial.com/announcing-the-programme-for-the-middle-passage-at-liverpool-biennial-2023/
April 2023
Artistic Metamorphosis Towards Social Justice
Michelle Eistrup is the Aaron Douglas Artist Fellow-in-Residence for The John Lewis Center for Social Justice on the campus of Fisk University.Growing up in Jamaica, Eistrup experienced spirituality as a ubiquitous factor. Africancosmology moved like an undercurrent through dance, music, gestures, and proverbs -and in closed circles. Since the mid-90s, she has explored several spiritual spheres of the African Diaspora, first with studies at Haverford University in the United States and then later with field work in the Caribbean and in West Africa.
Eistrup invites you to an open public workshop, held in conjunction with her work titled Charging Change 2nd movement, that will be exhibited at Fisk University in the Fall of 2023, as part of the EADJ program Artistic Activism and the Power of Collective Resistance, curated by Selene Wendt.
Charging Change is based on extensive research about Bakongo cosmology and ideology from 2015-2021. It connects scientific research and museum artifacts from across the western hemisphere with people and stories from among the African Diaspora. Participants of this workshop will be introduced to the visual language of
Bakongo cosmology. (As interpreted by Nashville-based dancers through movement and gesture, this cosmology becomes physical and tangible. Some of these dancers will be present to conduct the workshops: Henry Alumona (Dancer and Fisk Student), Shabbaz (Dancer), and Thea Jones (Dancer).
Their dance and the Dikenga cosmogram serve as an introduction to a large-scale public video installation that will be on view at Fisk later this year. Eistrup is committed to revitalizing the Bakongo cosmology, which radiates the core energy, philosophy, beauty, and strength still present in the African Diaspora, the Caribbean, and the United States.The first phase of Charging Change was presented at Documenta 15, Germany, where Eistrup collaborated with dancers and musicians from Portugal, Cape (or Cabo) Verde, and Brazil.
Eistrup wishes to thank EADJ, Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice, the Danish Arts Council, and the John Lewis Center for Social Justice Fisk University, who have sponsored this workshop and the coming Charging Change 2nd Movement. Eistrup also wishes to thank people from the community for their support: Dancers: Henry Alumona, Shabbaz, Thea Jones; Curator Selene Wendt; Dr. Cobra Mansa,
Professor Lakesha Moore, Visual Artist and Professor Magdalena Campos-Pons; The team at EADJ, Professor Jamaal Sheats, Professor Persephone Fentress, Professor Wilna Taylor, Professor C. Daniel Dawson, Dancer Aundra Lafayette, Professor Lena Winfree, Dean Adrienne Latham, Frank Inyima, Adrianna Carter, and Bryston Lee.
November 2022
'Boca Fala Tropa'. Video Art for a dance performance, Alacantra festival, Portugal.
What a pleasure and truly wonderful it has been to have been the video artist for Gio Lourenço's production BOCA FALA TROPA at Alacantra festival 11-27 Nov. 2022 Alacantra, Portugal.
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From a body to several times where memory reinvents itself, Gio Lourenço builds, having the movements of Kuduro as a basis. On this biographical itinerary, the Corpo becomes an allegory from memory. The Kuduro emerges in the 90s, in Luanda, in the
context of a civil war. The specific codes of this dance style, which expressed the Angolan daily, arrived in Portugal through the body and tapes of those who traveled between these two countries. It is at this time that the creator becomes a Kudurist; the dance steps, music, and aesthetics of this style established a coded language that allowed him to keep a link to Angola, where he was born and lived until the age of 5, the time when he moved to Portugal. Boca Fala Tropa proposes an identity territory displaced from a concrete geography - the transit between Angola and Portugal - starting from the Kuduro movements to cross elements of individual memory and their inevitable fictions with aspects of the collective memory.
September 2022
August 2022
May to June 2022
Galleri Image
NEW TACTICS FOR UNSEEN BODIES
Photo credit: Michelle Eistrup, Charging Change, Barreiro, Portugal.
Participant: Giovanni Lourenço
Opening: 6 May 4-6 pm
Artists: Michelle Eistrup (DK/JM), Juan Covelli (CO) Alinka Echeverria (UK/MX) and Alexandra Leykauf (DE).
How do we relate to the heritage of images, objects, and histories that our society has been built on? And how do we make the best use of them in our time? Four artists attempt to answer these questions in a new exhibition at Galleri Image, which opens on May 6.
You cannot wipe the slate of history clean. As humans, we are products of history and must either reproduce or transform the images we have received from previous generations into something that we can build our future on. The exhibition New Tactics for Unseen Bodies shows four international, award-winning artists’ work with our visual heritage through photography, video and collage. The artworks in the exhibition all concern themselves with the relationship between visibility and invisibility through the photographic medium, since it is though photography that we can ensure our own visibility, which allows us access to power and identity. The artists in New Tactics for Unseen Bodies create surprising transformations of bodies, landscapes, and ancient objects as tactical suggestions for how to challenge the positions of archives and collections - and in all these artworks the human body is present.
Michelle Eistrup (DK/JM), Juan Covelli (CO), Alinka Echeverria (UK/MX) and Alexandra Leykauf (DE) work with issues that reach both within and beyond Europe's borders. Alinka Echeverria's work "Nicéphora" stems from her research in the Nicéphore Niépce Museum's vast collection of historical photographs. Through thousands of photographs, she discovered a problematic pattern: Women were not depicted as individuals but were staged from an underlying conception of womanhood. In the exhibition's impressive 7-metre-long collage work, she has gathered images of women from antiquity onwards, thus making the pattern visible.The work of Colombian artist Juan Covelli - a large video work created with machine learning - works more indirectly with photography. By feeding an algorithm with photographs of ancient Colombian gold figures, he has created the work "Speculative Treasures", which allows the Colombian cult figure of the Quimbaya culture to symbolically break out of a Spanish museum collection.
New Tactics for Unseen Bodies is part of a global movement that sensually and critically uses today's media and gazes to process our contemporary self-understanding as historical and bodily beings. The four artists in the exhibition have distinguished themselves internationally in their work with the photographic image and related media, such as sculpture, video, installation, and computer generated images. The exhibition is complemented by events in collaboration with LiteratureXchange and Art Week Aarhus.
Galleri Image is proud to present the exhibition, which is the second in a series of exhibitions entitled New Tactics and examines how visual artists create works that act as tactical responses to changes in the relationship between body, identity, and photography in our visual culture. New Tactics is curated by artist and MA in Visual Culture Kirstine Autzen. The first, New Tactics - Moving in a Soft Field (2018), examined the relationship between photography and the body in the post-photographic era, and was part of the Photo Biennial 2018.
EVENTS
"Unseen body" - author and artist in conversation
Thursday 9 June, Galleri Image, Vestergade 29, 8000 Aarhus C
Come to Art Morning in Gallery Image. Here, Maja Lee Langvad, author of ‘SHE IS ANGRY - A Testimony of Transnational Adoption’, meets in a conversation with Michelle Eistrup, Danish-Jamaican visual artist. Both are concerned with how identity is formed and with what it means when home is in multiple locations. The event takes place in the exhibition New Tactics for Unseen Bodies, which includes Eistrup's works. Art Morning is a collaboration between Galleri Image and Art Week Aarhus. Free admission and morning coffee.
Symposium: "New Tactics"
Thursday 16 June, Kunsthal Aarhus, J. M. Mørks Gade 13, 8000 Aarhus
How do artists push for our understanding of identity? The symposium expands the group exhibition New Tactics for Unseen Bodies and examines the highly topical relationship between body and image in our time. Our bodies are changed and perceived in a close exchange with the images of them and photography, as technology, undergoes extensive changes. The artists and curator behind the exhibition as well as associate professor and creativity researcher Jan Løhmann Stephensen will participate in the symposium. More participants will be announced later. The symposium is organised in a collaboration between Galleri Image, Art Week Aarhus, Aarhus University and Kunsthal Aarhus. Free admission.
The exhibition is supported by The City of Aarhus, The Danish Arts Foundation, The Augustinus Foundation and The Grosserer L. F. Foght Foundation.
February to April 2022
RESIDENCY
PADA Studios, Barreiro, Portugal
March 2022
I am happy to announce the acquisition of 2 works by the Grassi museum in Leipzig, State of Saxony, Germany.
Installed as the first part of the Future Program REINVENTING GRASSI. SKD, funded by the “Initiative for Ethnological Collections” of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, aims at "extensively redesign our museum in the upcoming years". The corresponding sound collages/music in collaboration with composer Anders Juhl. Opening March 3rd, 2022.
"MICHELLE EISTRUP | We are very happy about the museum's purchase of the decolonial artworks “Breathing Archives" and "Amnesia" by Michelle Eistrup.
„Breathing Archives" highlights the violent ramifications the museum collecting policies brought to the communities concerned. This artwork was produced in close collaboration between the artist, our museum, and LIA- Leipzig International Art Programme. The corresponding sound collage was done in collaboration with the composer Anders Juhl.
The work "Amnesia" is a recorded poem with music. It contains thoughts by a citizen of a postcolonial background of a continent that denies its past.
In her work, Michelle Eistrup often engages with the physical and spiritual traces of colonialism.
See “Breathing Archives” from the 4th March 2022 onwards in our new exhibition.
Purchased thanks to the MUSEIS SAXONICIS USUI – friends of the Dresden State Art Collections.
February 2022
RESIDENCY
Hangar, Lisbon, Portugal. 1 week
October 2021
https://www.ffkd.dk/portfolio/byens-kroppe-og-sprogets-ord-michelle-eistrup-i-amager-centret/
Still image from the video work "CPH: Junctions & Checkpoints" by visual artist Michelle Eistrup. The work can be experienced on the Amager Center's 1st floor from Saturday 28 August. Photo: Michelle Eistrup.
April
How can we express things that seem unspeakable? Collective traumas leave far-reaching traces in the memory of communities and shape people‘s feelings, thoughts, and social behavior. Everything is lost: world, self, and voice. This is where the poetic powers of resistance of literature open up perspectives: they reveal speaking as a moment of liberation and a way out of speechlessness.
In the exhibition spaces, objects from the ethnological museums in Dresden and Leipzig enter into dialogue with works by artists and activists. A poetic trail accompanies and comments on the exhibition. As a result, a network is created in which spaces are opened up for action and speech. Central to this is the utopia of empathetic remembrance and a future that transcends speechlessness. Different forms and causes of speechlessness are examined from a differentiated yet global perspective: from the expropriation of the Australian Kaurna to the Shoah and the experiences of abuse of the so- called comfort women in the Second World War to the Yugoslavian wars.
“Wordless – Falling Silent Loudly” in the Japanisches Palais from 16 April on, which is dedicated to exploring possible ways of shattering the phases of silence that result when people suffer collective trauma at Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden until 1 August 2021.
Curated by Barbara Höffer and Leontine Meijer van Mensch, with with Olaf Schlote, Yajima Tsukasa, Michelle Eistrup, Kollektiv „kaboom“, Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Museum der Trostfrauen, Kim Seo Kyung und Kim Un Seong, Silvina Der Meguerditchian, Kollektiv Kuwash & Beatrice Babin, unverblümt, Anna Brägger, Ute Puder
4th October -1st Feb 2020
THRESHOLDS
BelONGING Vexillum (2019) Dimensions 118,38 x 90 cm. © Michelle Eistrup
Threshold(s) at CAMP, Curated by Temi Odumosu
Contributors
Michelle Eistrup (DK)
Yong Sun Gullach (DK)
Pia Arke (GL/DK)
Luanda Carneiro Jacoel (NO)
Saba Bereket Persson (SE)
Threshold(s) is a group exhibition, guest curated by British art historian and scholar Temi Odumosu, which explores experiences of displacement and exile by considering how people and their memories “crossover” and then inhabit land, culture, identities, structures, even language.
We engage with current immigration tensions and structural practices, but with a particular focus on the “inbetweenness” of movement as a state of being, which produces critical knowledge. The artists represented in Threshold(s) all have layered practices, including deep memory work, as well as, participatory and performative elements.
Situated in Nordic countries, they confront the geopolitical bordering impulse poetically, by exploring tipping points in their personal biographies that converge with wider political and historical contexts. Through them the threshold emerges as a ‘third place’, a site of/for transgression, a turning point, a leap, an ending, a beginning.
Immigration law is severe, and its lexicon of words and mechanisms for control have also inspired this intervention. In this vocabulary border crossings are characterised as transactional (status, visa, authorise, qualify, sponsor, admission), and people on the move are viewed as alien-others petitioning for rights of access to resources.
Here the “border” emerges as a loaded concept; described simply as a dividing line between territories, but negotiated as a shifting entity that is physical and psychological, sometimes rigid (a wall) and other times porous.
http://campcph.org/current-and-upcoming/thresholds
CAMP, c/o Trampoline House, Thoravej 7, DK-2400 Copenhagen, DK.
CAMP invites the public to the opening of Threshold(s) on Friday, Oct 4, 2019, from 2–5 pm. More information about the opening will be available soon.
27th & 28 April 2019
Michelle Eistrup is a visual artist, arts producer and instigator of artistic collaboration who lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. Michelle's art incorporates themes of identity, corporeality, faith, memory and post-colonialism, where her transnational background (Danish, Jamaican, American) is sometimes a point of departure. Currently, Eistrup is working on a film, Natango Zuzu (All Suns Forever). This piece will reunite artefacts of African culture and spirituality to stories and people in southern United States, and to the Kingdom of Kongo/Angola. The connection of these objects aims to both unite different environments and make the hidden meanings latent more visible. During her residency in LIA, Michelle will document some of their Nkisis'sfor the film, and work on developing a new print, that will participate in the Goethe sponsorship and program.
18 August 2018 - 7 January 2019.
In the Deep Underground and Up Above, SPACED 3:north by southeast, Group Exhibition
Art Gallery Of Western Australia, Perth.
Spaced 3: north by southeast will comprise 11 residency-based projects that will take place in regional, remote and outer-urban locations in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Western Australia. Nordic artists will undertake their residencies in Western Australia, whilst Australian artists will be placed in the Nordic region. These residencies are positioned as the means to develop new works that will be created by each artist in response to their engagement with the social, environmental and historical contexts of the host communities.
Spaced 3: north by southeast will explore the significant cultural, social and environmental parallels between the Nordic countries and Australia.
Residency locations will be situated in regional, remote or outer-urban centres. Underlying this curatorial choice is the idea that even smaller communities with a strong sense of their unique identity are deeply affected by global economic, environmental and social forces. Due to this, they face challenges that are in some respects shared by other, seemingly unrelated communities across the world. The ultimate aim being to explore local issues in a global context through cross-cultural exchanges mediated by art.
This core program will be complemented by the spaced 3: Education and Community Access program presented by Act-Belong-Commit, symposia, and an extensive post-event publication.
Participating artists: Robyn Backen (NSW), Michelle Eistrup (Denmark), Gustav Hellberg (Sweden), Deborah Kelly (NSW), Danius Kesminas (VIC), Tor Lindstrand (Sweden), Heidi Lunabba (Finland), Dan McCabe (WA), Linda Persson (Sweden), Keg de Souza (NSW), Sam Smith (NSW).
Nordic partners: Baltic Art Center (Gotland, Sweden), FABRIKKEN for Kunst & Design (Copenhagen, Denmark), Kirsten Kjaers Museum (Thylejren, Denmark), Mustarinda (Hyrynsalmi, Finland), Nes Artist Residency (Skagaströnd, Iceland), Rejmyre Art LAB (Rejmyre, Sweden).
West Australian partners: ArtGeo Complex (Busselton), Ravensthorpe Regional Arts Council (Ravensthorpe), Shire of Leonora (Leonora), Wangaree Community Centre/DADAA (Lancelin), Warlayirti Artists (Balgo).
http://three.spaced.org.au/spaced-3-north-by-southeast/
http://www.artgallery.wa.gov.au/exhibitions/spaced-3-north-by-southeast.asp
BAT: Bridging Art +Text publication
Read Article on KUNSTEN NU https://kunsten.nu/journal/danskerne-er-ligeglade/
BAT is a 3 volume publication edited by Michelle Eistrup and Annemari B Clausen,
produced by Anders Juhl & published in collaboration with The Karen Blixen Museum.
The overriding themes are: Spirituality, Black Identity and Aesthetics, Art &
Independence and Spaces for Art & Literature.
Contributers: Artists Christopher Cozier, Gillion Grantsaan, Ebony Patterson, Sasha Huber, Jeannette Ehlers, Charl
Landvreugd, Yo-Yo Gonthier, James Muriuki, Curators and Writers Carlos Moore,
Françoise Vergès, Britt Kramvig, Nicholas Laughlin, C. Daniel Dawson, Robert Farris
Thompson and many more.
http://michelleeistrup.com/link/BAT_Bridging_Art_and_Text
BAT: Bridging Art +Text publication at BOOK ART FAIRS
Upcoming Events
September Fotobok Gbg 18
Past Events
December 1st 2017
CAMP, Trampoline House
Copenhagen
May
19–21 October 2018
Miss Read
John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10
10557 Berlin
OCTOBER
Rensing Center, Rensing, South Carolina www.rensingcenter.org
DECEMBER
Spinnerei, LIA Leipzig, April 2018. https://liap.eu/index.php/de/
PAST RESIDENCIES
APRIL
Residency at Spinnerei, LIA Leipzig, April 2018. https://liap.eu/index.php/de/
Supported by the Danish Arts Council
JAN-MARCH
Spaced 3, North by South, Residency Part 2, Deep in the Underground and Up Above, Busselton Australia. Jan to March 2018. http://three.spaced.org.au/spaced-3-north-by-southeast/
Supported by the Danish Arts Council , ARTGEO, BUSSELTON and SPACED 3.