WOMEN ON AEROPLANES is touching ground in Frankfurt in June.
As the title reveals, our research, publication and exhibition project deals with women taking off. But how and where to? What does propel them? What do we know of them?
Zwischenlandung / Stopover is the 6th and (for the time being) last station of our research and exhibition project. Earlier iterations were Berlin, Lagos, Bayreuth, London, and Warsaw.
Since two years and in varying constellations, we have been working on questions like: Who are, who were these women fighting in struggles for independence in the 1930s to 1970s’ decades who traveled the world, founded organizations and created newspapers, established transnational networks, studied art, wrote essays and novellas, initiated new literatures through their radio programmes? Who appear here and there only randomly, but whose practices, if you look closely, offer more spacious, more complex views of history, society, and gender. They are present, but hardly represented visibly; their active range punctures and joins Europe, America, Asia, and Africa, countering the imagination of an ideologically segmented world—split into continents and disciplines, politics and culture, art and science.
Against this backdrop, we have been testing methods of filtering, editing, compiling, or cutting, with how female artists and political activists have been erased from history, and others were emphasized (1 Berlin, FILTER, December 2017); we questioned the nature of archives (2 Lagos, SEARCH RESEARCH, Looking for Colette Omogbai, May 2018); were wondering what it means to enter collections, and to actually collect (3 Bayreuth, RESONATE, June to December 2018); what kind of exhibiting and digesting artistic research can initiate (4 London, Women on Aeroplanes, October 2018 to January 2019), and how the question about the presence of women reaches the limits of national discourses of independence and gives them a new meaning (5 Warsaw, Niepodlegle. Women, Independence and National Discourse, October 2018 to February 2019). Please look at the website of the Iwalewahaus University of Bayreuth for more details:
https://www.iwalewahaus.uni-bayreuth.de/de/projects/100_women-on-aeroplanes/index.html
In Frankfurt this June, under the title of Zwischenlandung / Stopover, artists and intellectuals gather in a number of activities.
Exhibition, June 7-29, opening June 6, 7pm
Zwischenlandung / Stopover opens with an exhibition by the artists Fatoumata Diabaté, Rahima Gambo, and Theresa Kampmeier who, using photography, film, and materials found on site, engage with the location and their own temporary stay in this place.
Fatoumata Diabaté (Bamako/Montpellier), documenter and commission photographer, shows large-format prints from her series on the life of the Malian community in Paris (2006), and throughout the exhibition photographic works will be added from places Diabaté resides in for her work in June, among other places from Bamako (where she prepares her work for the photography biennale).
Rahima Gambo (Abuja), documentary photographer and journalist, exhibits photographs and collages dealing with the act of walking and remembering, the fluidity of the contemporary, and with questions of cut-outs, stratification, and (plant) growth.
Theresa Kampmeier (Berlin), graduate of the academy of fine arts Frankfurt/Main, re/acts conceptually to contexts, textures, and the potential agency of the space and its activities, accompanying the project, emphasizing access points, and testing ir/reversible gestural interventions. She starts this process off from a photograph of Hotel Luxor (2015), a hotel now closed opposite the runway at TOR.
Gathering, June 20—23
During the exhibition, a four day-long public gathering is held in the exhibition space, providing the international participants with an opportunity to meet and to continue working together; it offers a moment of encounter and exchange between locals of Frankfurt and the contributors on their stop over.
The dense program of presentations and talks evolves around the associative-conceptual and thematic trajectories of the "stopover". We are creating this program in exchange with the participating guests: the artists of the exhibition Rahima Gambo and Theresa Kampmeier, as well as Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar (The Otolith Group, London), Laura Horelli (Berlin), and Temitayo Ogunbiyi (Lagos); film makers Jean-Pierre Bekolo (Berlin/Bogotà), Jihan El-Tahri (Berlin/Dakar), Andy Amadi Okoroafor (Paris/Barcelona), writers and researchers Garnette Cadogan (Boston) and Michael C. Vazquez (New York), graphic designers Alexandra Papadopoulou and Marie Schopmann (VERY, Frankfurt/Main), designer, publisher, and architect Ayodele Arigbabu (Lagos), curators Antonia Majaca (Berlin), Lily Hall (The Showroom, London), Iheanyi Onwuegbucha (CCA, Lagos), the co-curators of Women on Aeroplanes Annett Busch (Berlin/Trondheim) and Magda Lipska (Warschau), as well as Nadine Siegert (Iwalewahaus University of Bayreuth).
The detailed program will be published shortly at https://www.tor-artspace.de/.
The Women on Aeroplanes Inflight Magazine
Until now, we have produced three issues of the Women on Aeroplanes Inflight Magazine – a fleeting format which takes its title seriously, presents discussions, propels research, edits transcripts, assembles found bits of information, and experiments with its contextual fabrics. From time to time, the magazine takes the shape of a flying gallery. At the Gathering, issue #4 will be published. Issues #1-3 are available at TOR Art Space and can also be downloaded at https://www.theshowroom.org/library.
TOR Art Space Allerheiligenstr. 2–24, DE-60311 Frankfurt/Main, Opening times: Opening June 6., 7pm // Exhibition, June 7—29, 2019: Thu., Fri., Sat., 4—8pm, also Wed. June 5 and 19, 10am-8pm // Gathering: June 20—23, 10am-8pm
WOMEN ON AEROPLANES is funded by the TURN Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes) and is co-produced by Iwalewahaus University of Bayreuth. In collaboration with The Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos (CCA, Lagos), ifa-Galerie Berlin, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, The Showroom and The Otolith Collective, London, and TOR Art Space in Frankfurt/Main. Our Library becomes possible thanks to the support of the Städelschule library, Frankfurt.