State of the Wind
July 20, 6.00 pm
Munich, Olympic Park
Meeting Point: in front of SEA LIFE Aquarium
For the first time the Afro-American artists Justin Randolph Thompson, who lives in Florence, and the South African artist Lerato Shadi, who lives in Berlin, have agreed on a joint performance. They met and bonded in Florence in 2018 when Lerato Shadi lived and worked there as a Villa Romana prizewinner.
The work of both artists is characterized by the experience of blackness in the past and present.
Their collaborative performance in Munich – state of the wind – is a work generated by the viewer that unites presence as protest and fragility as nationalist property. Based on the history of the Olympic Games and the friction between demonstration and resistance, the work uses the hierarchical framework of the podium to reflect on social and spiritual heights. Sound becomes a marker in the performance or non-performance of the artists. It enables a meditation on the work of performance and the social hypocontextuality of the black body.
Lerato Shadi’s works are about violence, a centuries-old history of violence, contempt and disfranchisement of which there are not even witnesses and records because those who experienced it were not the ones who wrote it. In her videos, performances and installations, Lerato Shadi addresses Black Feminism, the erased lives of black women whose voices have been silenced.
Justin Randolph Thompson, sculptor, media artist and musician, examines the significance of cultural relics and their transformation through expulsion and diaspora. With his often collaborative and interdisciplinary practice, he creates platforms and communities as temporary monuments, exploring socio-cultural stratification and hierarchical organization with hybrid, non-linear connections between past and present. Justin Randolph Thompson is co-founder of the Black History Month Florence.
