Exhibition: NEVER CROSS THE SAME RIVER TWICE – Semiotics of Subjectivity – Vol 2
Curated by: Kisito Assangni
Opening: November 3rd, 6pm to 9pm
Dates: Until November 17th 2021, Tuesday to Saturday, between 3pm and 7pm
Place: R. Damasceno Monteiro, 12 R/C | 1170-112 – Lisbon
Featuring: Ahmet Ogut (Turkey), Longinos Nagila (Kenya), Marinella Senatore (Italy), Mohammed Laouli (Morocco), Aïda Patricia Schweitzer (Luxembourg), Kokou Ekouagou (Togo), Emo de Medeiros(Benin/France), Moataz Nasr (Egypt), Sammy Baloji (DR Congo) & Lazara Rosell Albear (Cuba).
©️ Mohammed Laouli. Video Still – The sculptures weren’t white.
NEVER CROSS THE SAME RIVER TWICE encompasses large-scale videographies that aim to support new kinds of transnational and global encounters. The selected video works are sites of visual contestation, realist in style with narratives that review the past, guarantee chronicles and ancestors, decolonize the brain and the creative mind.
Alluding to Heraclitus’river, which viewed the way of life as a substance in constant transition and vacillation, the title of the project is a call to imagine new natural, political, and administrative foundations and frameworks established. In examining the restrictions of film as activism, much of the work of interest reflects what Argentine scholar Walter D. Mignolo calls the important epistemic challenge and decolonial opportunity to remake a just future.
NEVER CROSS THE SAME RIVER TWICE opens up shattering ghostly results of new imaginaries. It hopes to extend and densify the interconnected themes woven into the presentation program: history, filiation, ethnography, otherness, memory, colonization, Afrofuturism, women’s liberation, diaspora, personality, globalization, myth.
Kisito Assangni is a Togolese-French curator and consultant who studied museology at Ecole du Louvre in Paris. Currently living between UK, France and Togo, his research interests gravitate towards the cultural impact of globalization, psychogeography, and critical education. He investigates the modes of cultural production that combine theory and practice. He inherently aims at going beyond the usual relations between artist, curator, institution, audience, and artwork in order to engage audiences in encounters with art that are unexpected, transformative, and fun. Assangni is heavily involved in video, performance, and experimental sound.
His discursive public programs and exhibitions have been shown internationally, including the Venice Biennale, ZKM Museum, Karlsruhe; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Centre of Contemporary Art, Glasgow; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Malmo Konsthall, Sweden; Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles; Es Baluard Museum of Art, Palma, Spain; National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow; HANGAR, Lisbon; Marrakech Biennale among others.
Assangni has participated in talks, seminars, and symposia at numerous institutions such as the British Museum, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Ben Uri Museum, London; Pori Art Museum, Finland; Kunsthall 3.14, Bergen (Norway); Sala Rekalde Foundation, Bilbao; Depart Foundation, Malibu (USA); Sint-Lukas University, Brussels; University of Plymouth, UK; University of Pretoria, South Africa; Motorenhalle Centre of Contemporary Art, Dresden (Germany); Kunsthalle Sao Paulo, Brazil; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Ticino, Switzerland. He is a contributing editor at ArtDependence Magazine and Arshake.
Assangni is the founder of TIME is Love Screening (International video art program) and serves as curatorial advisor to Latrobe Regional Gallery in Morwell – Victoria, Australia.