Opening: Thu, 05/10/2023, 6 pm
Afterparty at Club U, 10 pm
Duration: 06/10/2023 – 02/12/2023
Artist: Soñ Gweha
Curator: Frederike Sperling
I believe that we need to demand temporalities and spaces in which to live off pleasure and joy, to emancipate our bodies, to do up our ideas in drag, and to thank the fruits of the future as an act of reparative and ecological justice. – Soñ Gweha [1]
A power source of tender force generatin', radiatin' - Turn me on, turn them on [...] Butterfly caught up in a hurricane, hurricane - Lucky me, I'm better free . – Smokey Robinson[2]
The regeneration of the Earth is inextricably linked to the healing of the racialized body: at least since the beginning of colonialism, the plundering and destruction of nature has gone hand in hand with the exploitation and oppression of disenfranchised people. Recognizing this connection – as activist and philosopher Angela Y. Davis puts it, this “calamitous intersection of racial capitalism and systemic assaults on the environment”[3] – is at the center of a so-called “decolonial ecology.”[4]
Thinking and working within this perspective, the artist, DJ, poet, and community organizer Soñ Gweha articulates various strategies for inscribing pleasure and joy as tools for entering what they refer to as the “healing body.” Their transdisciplinary practice, spanning video, sculpture, installation, sound, and DJing, centers the power of queer eroticism and focuses on care, desire, friendship, and family bonds as sources for agency.
Soñ Gweha’s first solo exhibition in Austria, A Quiet Storm Blowin’ unfolds as a multi-sensual landscape that alternately serves as a stage, a resting zone, or a site of action and encounter, and then again all of these at once. With its focus on activation the show encompasses – next to three installational pieces from Soñ Gweha – a Dj booth, a workshop area and a library. A public live program hosted by the artist and local as well international collaborators utilize these places and make the exhibition continuously transform itself.
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[1] Soñ Gweha, “Safous and other fruits of the future,” in Sex Ecologies, ed. S. Hessler, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022), 98.
[2] Smokey Robinson, Quiet Storm, 1975, last modified January 27, 2023, https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/25134413/Smokey+Robinson/Quiet+Storm
[3] Angela Y. Davis, “Foreword,” in Decolonial Ecology, xv.
[4] Ferdinand, 2022: 3.
For more in-depth information about the exhibition, we invite you to take a look at the accompanying brochure, including a short interview with Soñ Gweha by Frederike Sperling (artistic director of Kunstraum Niederoesterreich).