A Review of ‘O Quilombismo’ at HKW Berlin

by Lorna McDowell // June 27, 2023

A video installation by artist Hajra Waheed brings our awareness to the coiled and winding shape of the spiral, one of the most widespread forms found in nature. It is described as more than just a form, and ever evolving. For this inaugural exhibition of Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s new era, Director and Chief Curator Prof. Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, formerly of SAVVY Contemporary, invites us into “a spiral of a story, the story of quilombismo.” Like a spiral, this story has regenerative beginnings and ends, ascent and descent.

‘O Quilombismo: Of Resisting and Insisting. Of Flight as Fight. Of Other Democratic Egalitarian Political Philosophies,’ 2023, installation view at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) // Photo by Laura Fiorio/HKW

There are a number of key figures to note, but we might start with Zumbi, a 17th-century Brazilian leader of Congolese descent who resisted Portuguese rule and freed enslaved people from the plantations. Many of those liberated by Zumbi, or indeed in other emancipatory movements worldwide, went on to create their own communities, or “quilombos”—cultivating a society based on egalitarianism. ‘O Quilombismo: Of Resisting and Insisting. Of Flight as Fight. Of Other Democratic Egalitarian Political Philosophies’ draws on further development of the quilombist philosophy by Brazilian artist, author and politician Abdias Nascimento, who, in his 1980 essay ‘Quilombismo: An Afro-Brazilian Political Alternative,’ described it as “fraternal and free reunion, or encounter; solidarity, living together, existential communion.” These values are at the core of the exhibition, which seeks to carve out a space for resistance, insistence and emancipation through collectivity and joy.

Celia Vasquez Yui with Diana Ruiz Vasquez: ‘The Council of the Mother Spirits of the Animals,’ 2020/23 // Courtesy the artists and Shipibo Conibo Center, NY; Bastin Santan Diggekar: ‘Untitled,’ 2023 // Courtesy the artist, Installation view of the exhibition ‘O Quilombismo: Of Resisting and Insisting. Of Flight as Fight. Of Other Democratic Egalitarian Political Philosophies,’ 2023, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) // Photo by Laura Fiorio/HKW

The exhibition spans rhythmically through and around the historical congress hall of HKW and its surroundings, activating them with a colourful animism. The cavernous space is used to full effect, with artworks displayed high, low and in collaboration with original features of the building. A painted mural by artist and musician Tanka Fonta adorns the encircling wall of the now-named Sylvia Wynter foyer. ‘The Cosmogenic Interconnectedness: “How Did We Talk Before The Roman Alphabet?”’ depicts an abstract journey of visual, sonic and poetic imprints in dialogue with an orchestrated hymn that completes the work acoustically. Mirroring this roundness and looping of space, the floor mural ‘Skizze zu Kubatana (togetherness / unity / connecting / touching / holding)’ (2023) by Nontsikelelo Mutiti traverses through the Mrinalini Mukherjee Hall. Mutiti depicts the patterns and rhythm of braided hair, illustrated through sampling and repetition using floor paint and laser cut stencils. The mural speaks to the braiding of African hair as a technology of African culture and an emblem of African pride and affirmation. Braiding was once used as a tool for designing maps to escape slavery. Here, the pattern interjects in the space and weaves around other works, as if to guide visitors in a flowing, non-authoritarian fashion.

Sculptural works are suspended from some ceilings and the use of saturated wall colours throughout the exhibition defies the sterility of the ever-popular European-American white cube format. Narrated by voices from many worlds and cultures, and employing a playful style of exhibition design, the exhibition loosens the structures and hierarchies that can naturally inhabit this building—an architectural icon of post-war western modernity. The rooms and spaces of HKW have been renamed to celebrate important but mostly unacknowledged women of marginalised identities, as another act of resignifying and reclaiming that marks the beginning of this new chapter.

In Beatriz Nascimento Hall, colours and sounds convene around works that include three photographs displayed in the style of a triptych by seminal Black British photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode. The photographs allude to the tensions between queerness, sexuality and the African masculinised body, as well as the subversion of Yoruba symbols. In ‘Every Moment Counts’ (1989), the male body is hunched forward, vulnerable to the camera and the viewer’s gaze. An anonymous hand reaches up into the frame, grabbing the flesh of the figure, which itself reaches up to grab a vessel headed with a sinister white mask, evoking those worn during times of the Great Plague and darkly suggestive of the disproportionate number of Black, queer people living with HIV in the 1980s, and still today. Fani-Kayode’s photographs are raw and visceral in their directness—embodying a sense of defiant pageantry that is found elsewhere in the exhibition, and evoking contemporary queer club culture. Alongside other works by queer or marginalised artists, they are emblematic of the radical solidarity of quilombismo with all those who struggle against inequalities motivated by race, religion or ideology.

Venturing into the Lili Elbe Garden, visitors are invited into the engulfing darkness of a room housing Hajra Waheed’s aforementioned video installation, ‘The Spiral’ (2019). Drawing from Waheed’s practice of mapping patterns of colonial and state violence, this poetic installation reflects on the nonlinear and spiral-like qualities of collective human experience and social transformation. The narrator describes the multiplicity of the spiral form and its geometry in nature as the camera pans slowly over palm leaves in near-darkness, lulling us into a deep listening and encounter with the work. In this darkened room, and as found elsewhere throughout the exhibition, viewers can fall into large, soft floor cushions, which add to the atmosphere of sensorial comfort and conviviality that immerses the bodies who pass through this site of quilombismo.

Hajra Waheed: ‘The Spiral (2019),’ video Installation, 7m 10s // Photo by Toni Hafkenshied, courtesy of the artist

Houngan Jean-Daniel Lafontant with Claude Saturne: ‘Invoking Papa Legba,’ ceremonial opening in the course of ‘Acts of Opening Again: A Choreography of Conviviality,’ 2023, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) // Courtesy the artists, photo by Marvin Systermans/HKW

HKW’s reopening festival ‘Acts of Opening Again: A Choreography of Conviviality’ began on June 2nd, with a pulsing ceremonial drum procession led by voudou priest Houngan Jean-Daniel Lafontant, entitled ‘Invoking Papa Legba.’ Papa Legba is said to be “the gate opener, guardian of crossroads, and intermediary between a spiritual dimension and the telluric worlds.” ‘O Quilombismo’ is an exercise in crossing realms, borders and cosmologies. The exhibition offers a spiralling cultural ritual of healing and restitution that shakes consciousness. It is a space to be continuously cultivated, in which we are allowed to imagine what cultural resistance to our contemporary condition(s) could look like.

Exhibition Info

HKW Berlin

Group Show: ‘O Quilombismo: Of Resisting and Insisting. Of Flight as Fight. Of Other Democratic Egalitarian Political Philosophies’
Exhibition: June 2–Sept. 17, 2023
hkw.de
John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, 10557 Berlin, click here for map