Forthcoming (Not Yet Here, But Always Been There)
Devika Chotoe responds with a performance to patricia kaersenhout’s exhibition in CBK Zuidoost. In this exhibition a central role is played by kaersenhouts’s new film Le retour des femmes colibris in which she stages a fictional meeting with Josephine Baker, Suzanne Césaire, Christiane Diop, Frida Kahlo, and Paulette and Jeanne Nardal – all women who played a key, if not also invisible, role within the Négritude movement.
Devika Chotoe with Anne Jesuina and Paula Montecinos
Within the context of her fellowship at If I Can’t Dance, Devika was invited to intervene into artist patricia kaersenhout’s exhibition The Third Dimension at CBK Zuidoost. The exhibition consists of a selection of beautifully executed series of work, in a range of media and spanning several decades. The show highlight’s kaersenhout’s relentless commitment to retrieving forgotten and erased stories, showing how the bodies and lives of black women have been rendered invisible, or conversely, eroticised, in official histories and representations. Kaersenhout’s work reassembles existing images, materials and narratives, stitching and puzzling them into new imaginaries and narratives that reveal how history is malleable; it can be reformalized and rewritten so as to revisit the past in order to reconfigure understandings of the present.
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“These places of possibility within ourselves are dark, because they are ancient and hidden: they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface: it is dark, it is ancient and it is deep” (Audre Lorde)
Within the context of her fellowship at If I Can’t Dance, Devika was invited to intervene into artist patricia kaersenhout’s exhibition The Third Dimension at CBK Zuidoost. The exhibition consists of a selection of beautifully executed series of work, in a range of media and spanning several decades. The show highlight’s kaersenhout’s relentless commitment to retrieving forgotten and erased stories, showing how the bodies and lives of black women have been rendered invisible, or conversely, eroticised, in official histories and representations. Kaersenhout’s work reassembles existing images, materials and narratives, stitching and puzzling them into new imaginaries and narratives that reveal how history is malleable; it can be reformalized and rewritten so as to revisit the past in order to reconfigure understandings of the present.
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