Contamination / Minia Biabiany

Contamination
Hannah Black, Rindon Johnson, Mire Lee, Eoghan Ryan
March 27–May 16, 2021

Encounters, contact and coalition are processes of contamination. Distinct entities collide and change. A substance, being or community is tainted, corrupted or afflicted by something else. Purity is an illusion. Phantasms of purity characterise the ventures of European Western modernity. They reside in, but aren’t limited to epistemological pursuits, the striving for stable categories, precise boundaries and clear-cut identities. These imaginaries tend to be centred on a rational, self-determined subject—all too often straight, white and male—who claims to embody the human in its purest form.

The works in the exhibition Contamination question what is defined as human. They undermine the idea of a self-contained individual that asserts its privileged position in opposition to the other. Living beings are inevitably entangled through innumerable relationships of collaboration and contamination; they are constructed by their environments and the very boundaries of their bodies are permeable themselves. They are bound into metabolic processes and interdependencies, sometimes toxic systems that have been and continue to be shaped by exploitation and violence, by forms of consumption and cannibalism, by mechanisms of colonialism and racism.

The concept of contamination serves as a loose conceptual framework for the exhibition, bringing together works and new commissions by four artists, which in turn proceed from this framework on paths that occasionally cross. The exhibition is not intended as a commentary on the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, it more generally pursues the conflictual processes and dynamics that exist between contamination and the politics of purity.

The group show is accompained by various events, among them a conversation with philosopher Alexis Shotwell and a workshop by the local initiative “Dear White People …”.

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Minia Biabiany
June 11–July 25, 2021

Minia Biabiany (b. 1988, Guadeloupe) arranges materials, sounds, videos and images to form spacial narratives. These deal with the conflictual and violent stories that have been inscribed into the landscapes of the Guadeloupe archipelago and into the bodies of its people. They tell of the wounds of French colonial rule that bleed into the present, of the plantation economy and slavery, as well as of the contamination of the ecosystem through the use of pesticides in the 1970s.

A particular attention to the nature, use and meaning of materials characterises Biabiany’s practice. The lines of earth piled up across the floor form patterns that recall a traditional weaving technique, used to make fish traps in the Caribbean. In the most literal sense of the words, Biabiany interweaves and entwines tales forgotten in Western historiography; tales of her home country, bound once again in neocolonial relationships of dependency as a department of Overseas France.  

Biabiany attaches decisive importance to movement and intuitive exploration in space, as well as to the sensual and corporeal experience of space, in order to place those overlapping and intermingling narratives in relation. She takes on the task of troubling the dichotomies of “nature” and “culture,” “subject” and “object,” and of giving voice to other-than-human entities. In this way, connections and dependencies within a territory can be made visible: shells become mediums of communication; dangling coloured chains made of moulded wax and burnt pieces of wood are presented to the wind as votive offerings, said to hold powers of healing and resistance; burned willow baskets resembling boat hulls refer, in their fragility, to ephemerality and defencelessness—to those conditions that can be traced throughout the exhibition in a multitude of languages, voices and images.

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Curatorial team: Heinrich Dietz, Director / Nelly Kuch, Curatorial Assistant / Theresa Rößler, Curatorial Assistant