Emmanuel Ndefo
Adamma – “The Passage”

Performance with screening and following artist talk

Saturday, 22.04.2023, 7 pm (sharp)
Doors open at 6:30 pm

As a prelude to the exhibition Taking Shapes, we are delighted to present the newly produced solo performance Adamma –"The Passage" by Nigerian artist Emmanuel Ndefo. Based on the Igbo maiden spirit ritual 'Adamma', the work touches on forms of transgression and of shape shifting through embodiment and African ancestral spirituality.

Emmanuel Ndefo (*1991 in Kano, Nigeria) is a performance artist, researcher and choreographer working with his body as an instrument of resistance. He is interested in de-colonial and queer pedagogies within indigenous African spirituality and performance practices foregrounding acts that unsettle hegemonic political and social norms around gender and sexuality in Africa.

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Taking Shapes

Group exhibition

with Wilder Alison, Harry Hachmeister, Jonas Monka, Emmanuel Ndefo, Jonathan Penca, Toni Schmale et al.

02.06. – 02.07.2023
Opening: Thursday, 01.06.2023, 6 pm

Being in shape is an expression of fitness and physical performance in a normative capitalist society. It describes a static condition, the fitting into a form. Instead of assuming a variety of shapes (and to ask in what kind of shape) the term implies that there is a universal ideal of shape. The exhibition and performance program Taking Shapes brings together artists who refuse to follow this limited reading. Rather, their works (sculptures, paintings, performances, videos) are characterized by the process of form finding: Through probing and extending forms and materials in the sense of an expanded concept of sculpture and against a rigid understanding of the body, the artists work with a fluid and fragmented variety of forms – of bodies, of genders, of objects, of identities, of states, of spaces. Through transgression, the exhibited works oppose binaries and present multiple ways of taking shapes, including modes of shape-shifting and in-between states of constant transformation to ultimately, as Virginie Despentes puts it, open a space „where you can become something entirely different from what you had been allowed to imagine“ so we „live in constant transition – which is the property of life“. (Virginie Despentes, in: Paul Preciado, An Apartment On Uranus, London 2019, p. 26)

Open during the hours of the exhibitions Saturdays 12-17 h and by appointment

Lore Deutz
in der Ausstellungshalle im KunstWerk Köln
Deutz-Mülheimer Straße 115
(former number 127)
51063 Köln

The exhibition and performance program is co-curated by Miriam Bettin and Alwin Lay. 

Taking Shapes takes place in the framework of LOOTING THE NORMAL sponsored by Stiftung Kunstfonds / Neustart Kultur.