The Living and the Dead Ensemble: LANJELIS / Charlotte Johannesson: ALL LINED UP

The Living and the Dead Ensemble: LANJELIS 
Mackenson Bijou, Rossi Jacques Casimir, Dieuvela Cherestal, James Desiris, Louis Henderson, Léonard Jean-Baptiste, Cynthia Maignan, Sophonie Maignan, Olivier Marboeuf, Zakh Turin

When day gives birth to night in the Caribbean, another life becomes possible. LANJELIS is a time for rest and marronnage. Far from prying eyes, shelter is sought, a path. It is also a time of secret revolts, of music and dance, stories and elusive images. A language—Creole—and a shared imagination were thus invented, drawing on the traces that remain from African lives lost on
 the Atlantic crossing, and from contact with European and Indigenous cultures. 

LANJELIS assembles points of view on the world emanating from a region directly exposed to climate crisis. The richness
 of Haitian cultural production cannot hide a chaotic political situation that is currently pushing the island’s inhabitants into exile. LANJELIS offers an echo of their revolt against a corrupted State.

Oscillating between day and night, between revolutionary fervor and chaos, between past and future, all intimately entangled, LANJELIS speaks of the powers of Haiti and Caribbean imagination, in the form of the wake. The wake is a living place that demands presence. This exhibition is conceived of as a space for dialogue, debate, shared forms of knowledge and hospitality 
to evade any tendency toward voyeurism or extractivism in the matter of cultures from the Global South. The Ensemble is realising a comprehensive project at the intersection of cinema, literature and theatre, bringing together all works of the last five years. The Ensemble are artists 
in residence at the Kunstverein.

Program
July 14, 8pm: The Wake. Theater play.

July 15, 8:30pm: Images/imagineries from Haïti. Talk by Giscard Bouchotte, with Rossi Jacques Casimir
 & James Desiris

July 16, 2–5pm
: Krik!? Krak! Krik!?
 Workshop with the Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe.
6pm: Raranaval. Contemporary Rara.
8pm: Freda by Gessica Généus, with Dieuvela Cherestal & Cynthia Maignan.

Charlotte Johannesson: ALL LINED UP
ALL LINED UP presents Charlotte Johannesson (1943, Malmö, Sweden) in her first comprehensive solo exhibition in Germany. The artist works in various media, including textiles, plotter prints, painting, and digital slide presentations. Among her interests are anti-disciplinary symbolism, the circulation of knowledge, and a continuous striving for innovation. The exhibition extends from textile works of the 1970s to computer graphics of the 1980s and all the way to current computer made textiles. Johannesson’s artistic praxis links
 the craft technology of the weaving loom with the digital technology of computer programming. Trained as a weaver, she produced politically motivated tapestries in the late 1960s and developed her works in self-organised and extra-institutional structures. The way in which she deploys the weaving loom, activating it politically and associating it with digital patterning, also undermines forms of gender-specific normalisation and binary classifications. Her artistic approach situates in relation to the countercultures of the 1960s and 70s,
 the punk movement, feminism, and the incipient digital movement.

In 1978, together with her partner Sture Johannesson, she founded the first digital art laboratory in Scandinavia. For the so-called “Micro-Performances”, Johannesson designed Computer graphics that resided between pop-cultural symbolism and graphic abstraction. Later on, she evolved this process to include numerous plotted prints that were coded to the dimensions of the weaving loom. In the computer made textiles from 2019, she re-uses images from the 1980’s, once again exploring the possibilities of medial and handcraft production, intensifying forms of representation to the point of crisis and devising a speculative image world that 
is situated beyond institutional legitimation: “Save as art? Yes/No”.

Curated by Anja Casser. 

With special thanks to the gallery Hollybush Gardens, London.

Artist talk: July 1, 7pm, with Charlotte Johannesson

For more information, please visit: badischer-kunstverein.de

LANJELIS is funded by the program “Kultur trotz Corona” of the Ministry of Science, Research and Arts Baden-Württemberg.