Wandering monk of the streets, and also: Sensuous! ¹

This text was initially conceived as an invitation to you to Punya 2.0 ². I wanted to invite you to look, listen and process the exhibition and to listen to what pops up, what colours, what songs, what memories, stories, smells, and irritations come up. To share them at the front desk. On one hand, these may create other worlds for me to infuse or know. I then thought seriously about what an invitation assumes ³ – it assumes a confidence in the invitee that their contribution is interesting. It also assumes an infrastructure to host the invitee and their response. It also assumes that an invitee is able to receive the invitation.

For a while now I have considered my curatorial work as a holding practice ⁴ and this means that the place I am working in should have capacity to hold someone in their entirety ⁵ — not only the usual artist fee, shipping and travel but to think what issues the house has, what processes are redundant to what I am doing, and how all of these make it conducive to hold practice. Art spaces by and large are capable of holding objects as assets ⁶ and hardly ever consider the artist—gender, class, race, language, papers, resources—and these are just superficial in that these need to be dealt with so as to open up space for the artist and their practice; their interest, vocabularies, engagements. The invitation assumes that the artist and their work can be held, that their interest will be engaged.

In my conception of Punya, assumptions of curatorial practice were laid out, assumptions about a black woman ⁷ colonially trained ⁸ were laid out, stereotypes about my interest were laid out, my interests were laid out, the violences these assumptions speak of were also laid out, the institutional practices and their problematics were laid out. To shape a practice of holding practice on its own terms that is constantly changing and demanding an expansiveness of vocabularies that are themselves always in the midst of transformation.

Punya ⁹ was conceived to think infrastructurally in order to uphold the interest of artists and their practices. With every text, in every exhibition including their admin, across projects at Kunsthalle Bern, in conversations, lectures and talks, my practice of unlearning colonial thinking continued as a way of working. A practice of holding is a holding of practice; is a practice that holds; changes in how it holds; holds that which is always changing. Not holding it in place, but a hold that wanders, a hold that shakes.

Punya 2.0 invites Nyakallo Maleke intuitively draws lightly, moving us to reflection; Eric Gyamfi listens to plants in his neighbourhood producing ways of photography to be used by botanists; African Film Institute who bring popular music videos into the exhibitionary adding annotations for public circulation; Rohini Devasher observes lack of subjectivity in scientific observation and its mark on that which is observed; Asako Iwama gestures at missed connections and moments that are at the periphery of hazy memories; Nina Emge’s calls us to listen beyond the perceptible; in Daniela Catrileo & Nicole L’Huillier’s work we hear Mapuche cosmology in the present not shying away from legacies of Spanish empire; the Kunsthalle Bern team we asked to share flowers ¹⁰ on their minds; David Koloane speaks of street dogs met with regimes of sanitisation; Sindi-Leigh McBride paces through collisions; Camilla Paolino peppers the air with phantom 1970’s feminist song; Slaven Tolj reads the psychogeography of wars waged carelessly; Raqs Media Collective brings provisions for everybody.

Punya 2.0 is a moment of public gathering; a collisionary potential; a seeding station; a part of an ongoing claim on the curatorial that includes artworks, plants, texts, sounds, material, administration, music, years.

I invite you to walk these rooms as if in a maze where difference is an illusion that can only be sustained as a stolen indulgence. You are invited. Bring a story, a reference, a song, a laugh, a quandary, a strategy, a tool for more exuberant moments.

Punya 2.0 is a public rehearsal of moulting as I gather from your stories, your tools, references, and anecdotes so that I may do the work of destabilising my own truths that I hold tight while inviting a shaking. ¹¹

___________
¹ The title is taken from an interview of Julias Eastman which was recorded in 1984 while he was houseless. He also mentions that he is Sensuous which made me think of the expectation of Winnie Mandela being celibate while waiting for Nelson Mandela’s unimaginable release after 27 years in prison. Njabulo Ndebele writes a fictional book The Cry of Winnie Mandela which engages with the expectations of South African women to exhibit faithfulness and loyalty while men are produced as sensuous and faithfulness is not read in relation to monogamy.

² The invitation now is explicit but truly every public moment is an invitation to move and be moved ever so slightly. It felt disingenuous to invite you explicitly, a quandary of being.

³ Laying out the stereotypes and problematics of the contemporary art world and the discomfort it brought to me as someone interested in working in not only as just world but a world that took me as I am. Read Ocean Vuong’s text The 10 books I needed to write my novel; Denise Ferreira Da Silva’s How (2019) text in the E-flux journal.

⁴ My work at Kunsthalle Bern has been part of a wider practice of Punya; what happens if we think of an entire programme of solo shows, group shows, invitations, correspondences, meetings, meals, as an extended exhibitionary that stretches across years.

⁵ “I needed these people to exist as they are, full of stories but not for a story” writes Ocean Vuong about his approach to writing.

⁶ In a chimurenganyana published by Chimurenga, Stacy Hardy writes about Julias Eastman; Eastman was invited to perform as part of John Cage’s set and during Eastman’s performance, Cage declares that, “The freedom in my music does not mean the freedom to be irresponsible!” The invitation that Eastman received was not to Eastman as he was but how he was assumed—in gratitude and him toeing the line. There was no room for him to exceed the invitation’s expectations. Hardy writes that “For all his talk about crossing boundaries – noise/ music, life/ art – he couldn’t take the leap. His ‘anti-art’ was still the same old shit: natural law devalued, social tradition minimized, rebellious gestures only accepted if they stayed safely walled in, caged within the tradition they sought to denied. Cage as cage.”

⁷ Denise Ferreira Da Silva writes in her text How (2019) that “From this perspective, it is possible to approach the how in a more general, even abstract way, without rendering it formal. Inversely, the how acquires a materiality unparalleled precisely because the doing resonates (refracts, diffracts, and reflects) the given arrangement of the social context, within which that doing vibrates as a feat, a deed, a burden, or an artefact—even though for the black female that does it, it will more likely be all four at once.”

⁸ Uhuru Portia Phalafala’s Mine Mine Mine book reads and writes the construction of patriarchy in South Africa through mine workers who were born in the villages to be sent as cheap labour in men only hostels where families and women were denied access.

⁹ The first iteration of Punya was exhibited as part of Raqs Media Collective’s curated exhibition In the Open or In Stealth in October 2018 at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. The protagonists included Neo “Hlasko” Mahlasela, ntu collective, Tito Zungu, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Thokazani Mhlambi, NoBuntu Mqulwana-Mhlambi, Cowboy bebop, Orchid, pelargonium and some research material. The first iteration of Punya sidestepped inheritance through a gesture of including my favourite Japanese animation Cowboy Bebop as part of the show amongst plants and artworks and music. Incongruity became a placeholder of describing the lack of a thematic even though the interest of breaking or disavowing colonial inheritance was at the core of how I was processing the work of curating and the works that were included.

¹⁰ Pussy Willow, Rosehip, Olive, Parrot Tulip, Coneflower, Lily of the Valley, Flax, Snowdrop, Willowleaf Meadowsweet.

¹¹ To refuse symmetrical relations and calculations. To move and be moved. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower introduces the concept of sharing physical pain and ecstasy of those near you. That when a violence is enacted it is felt in its entirety by those near.

This is a generator of more stories… of finding ways of being in the world that do not reproduce systemic violence. Butler tells stories like my maternal great grandmother. Hers were horror and thriller stories that captivate—that showed her constant negotiation with the dynamics of living in colonial times.

I search for more stories that attest to intentional practitioning where we course-correct in real time.

Winnie Mandela—and others—were sensuous; that is they ate life while dealing with systemic injustice.

They laughed, fought for themselves and others.

They crumbled under the weight of it all.

They insisted on living and…gleaning from these differing ways to negotiate with the systemic.

They gather moments of possibility and sheer exuberance even when it is temporary.