OPENING: ARCHIVES OF RESISTANCE AND REPAIR

Archives of Resistance and Repair
with Shiraz Bayjoo, Maeve Brennan & Onyeka Igwe
curated by Lexington Davis & Julia DeFabo
Neue Galerie Innsbruck
05.11.2021 – 15.01.2022

OPENING: 04.11.2021 | 18.00
The openings will take place in the context of the Premierentage 2021.

Presenting recent works of moving-image and installation art, Archives of resistance and repair explores artistic efforts to reconsider the meaning and function of historical records from a decolonial perspective. The exhibition locates sites where personal and public histories intersect, exposing fault lines between loss and recovery, entropy and rejuvenation, as well as fact and fiction. The work of Shiraz Bayjoo, Maeve Brennan, and Onyeka Igwe deconstructs powerful knowledge regimes by confronting documentary materials with new critical methodologies that foreground intimacy and embodied experience. Through their research-based practices, the artists remind us that the future can only be negotiated through reconciliation with our past and its lingering material remnants.

SHIRAZ BAYJOO is a contemporary multi-disciplinary artist who works with film, painting, photography, performance, and installation. His research-based practice focuses on personal and public archives addressing cultural memory and postcolonial nationhood in a manner that challenges dominant cultural narratives. Bayjoo has exhibited with the Institute of International Visual Arts, London; New Art Exchange, Nottingham; 5^th Edition Dhaka Art Summit; 14^th Biennale of Sharjah; 13^th Biennale of Dakar; and 21^st Biennale of Sydney. Bayjoo is a recipient of the Gasworks Fellowship and the Arts Council of England. He is an artist in residence at the Delfina Foundation and has recently been awarded the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.

MAEVE BRENNAN is an artist and filmmaker based in London. She is the current Stanley Picker Fine Art Fellow (2019-22) and is participating in British Art Show 9. Solo exhibitions include Chisenhale Gallery, London; The Whitworth, University of Manchester; Spike Island, Bristol; Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin; Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art in Turku, Finland; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria and OUTPOST, Norwich. Her films have been screened internationally at festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Sheffield Doc Fest and FILMADRID (Official Competition 2018). Brennan was a fellow of Home Workspace Program, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2013 -14) and was the recipient of the Jerwood/FVU Award 2018 and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award 2021.

ONYEKA IGWE is an artist and researcher based in London working between cinema and installation. Through her work, Onyeka is animated by the question — how do we live together? — with particular interest in the ways the sensorial, spatial and non-canonical ways of knowing can provide answers to this question. She uses embodiment, archives, narration and text to create structural ‘figure-of-eights’, a form that exposes a multiplicity of narratives. The work comprises untying strands and threads, anchored by a rhythmic editing style, as well as close attention to the dissonance, reflection and amplification that occurs between image and sound. Her works have been shown in the UK and internationally at film festivals and galleries. She was awarded the New Cinema Award at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2019 and the 2020 Arts Foundation Fellowship Award for Experimental Film.

Special Thanks to ED CROSS FINE ART | London.