Heavy Water | of Coordinates, Containers and Containment
curated by Jessica Edwards

Works by Diana Akoto-Yip, Justin Barton and Mark Fisher, Julius von Bismarck, Stephanie Comilang, Jessica Edwards and Nik Nowak, Steve Goodman (aka Kode9), Ayesha Hameed, Fabian Knecht, Mischa Leinkauf, Ella Littwitz, The Otolith Group, Su Yu Hsin (and Angela Goh)

26 JAN until 28 MAR

Heavy Water | of Coordinates, Containers and Containment is anticipated as a mutational encounter
between the participating artists’ exhibited works, asking us to think anew, following the late
Édouard Glissant’s ‘aquatic’ theories (1997) and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s conception of a ‘deep or
abyssal implicancy’ (2019), of how we might understand these works when reframed, recast, in a
poethics of relation, in dialogue with each other. Bringing together an exciting roster of international
artists, some of the diaspora, with a generation of Berlin-based artists of alexander levy gallery, the
exhibition explores how their approaches to the entanglements of a shared global history might
provide an intervention into how we might counter-actualise the prevailing narratives of history to
intercede in the futures that have been anticipated for us.

Taking as its indexical register the wet mechanics of both the historical and contemporary global movement of peoples – volitional or enforced – and commodities, of peoples transformed into commodities, Heavy Water | of Containers, Coordinates and Containment considers the entanglements and afterlives of maritime colonial history, racial capitalism, and contemporary hypermodernity: embarkations and disembarkations, promethean fantasies of the imposition of order, containment and mastery of uncharted ‘new worlds’, paralleled with unimaginable dystopian lived nightmares of abduction, dispossession, and displacement; of contestation over borders, exclusion zones and proprietorship of space; dislocation wrought through war, scarcity, persecution, and the acceleration of extreme climate events.

Commencing with the conceit of ‘Heavy Water’, its ambivalence and excess of meaning informs the span and framing of the exhibition, interrogating both Real and speculative visual (and sonic) histories and futurities. ‘Heavy Water’: as the process and medium through which neutrons, released from atoms, are slowed down through the transmutation of water itself by utilising an isotope of hydrogen to engender a nuclear chain reaction as, once more, nuclear catastrophism looms spectrally. ‘Heavy Water’: the channel, the sea, the ocean as freighted, weighted with precarious crossings, unsafe passage and untold trauma, and of practices concealing the most egregious extractive processes of capital becomes hauntological, “pregnant with as many dead as living” (Glissant, 1997:6), and where the value of a life is differentially calculated. From the slave ship to the transmodal container and its super cargo container carrier ship, from the colonial plantation to the refugee camp, and from the spectral threat of nuclear ruination to the escape fantasies of the colonisation of outer space, today James Baldwin’s profound and prophetic reflection, “Tomorrow you will all be negroes!” resonates more starkly.