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Existing Otherwise

For a New Politics of the Senses

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The one-year-long art project was initiated by artistic director Solvej Helweg Ovesen, Berlin in 2021, and now culminates in an international final exhibition at Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) in Tamale, Ghana, opening in January 2022. Based on the idea that there is no return to"normality" as it were before the crises and we need to find ways of exiting otherwise, the curatorial team including artists Isabel Lewis (Institute for Embodied Creative Practices, Callie's Berlin) and Ibrahim Mahama (SCCA) have been invited to co-curate and co-host the project. Whereas Lewis' performances, hostings, and choreographies transform our relation and idea of being together in order to help us to gain more intimacy among each other, Mahama rethinks our relation with material and history. The curatorial team have been working with all the invited artists from both continents to form a vision of how we can exist otherwise, materially, digitally, and relationally.

Existing Otherwise – For a New Politics of the Senses is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, kindly supported by the DAAD Artists-in- Berlin Program with Funds of the Federal foreign Office and executed and directed by XO Curatorial Projects (Kathrin Pohlmann & Solvej Helweg Ovesen) in close collaboration with the following partners:

  • 2021 © Galerie Wedding. Photo Juan Saez

    Galerie Wedding – Space for Contemporary Art, a communal exhibition space in Berlin under the artistic direction of Solvej Helweg Ovesen.
    www.galeriewedding.de

  • Callie’s im September 2020 © Callie’s. Photo Ink Agop

    The Institute for Embodied Creative Practices, Berlin Wedding, an ambulatory corpus of particular concerns and the sensorial currently operating from Callie’s Berlin, Shedha Lle Zürich, among other locations and the methodologies for addressing them founded by artist and choreographer Isabel Lewis in 2016.
    callies.berlin/en/residents/4-isabel-lewis

  • © Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo Nii Odzenma

    Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), Tamale, Ghana, founded by Ibrahim Mahama, who is an artist and lecturer in art and architecture at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana.
    www.sccatamale.org

Curatorial Team

Existing Otherwise – For a New Politics of the Senses

  • Solvej Helweg Ovesen

    Solvej Helweg Ovesen (DK) is an independent curator and cultural studies theoretician (Master in Communication and Cultural Studies Roskilde University, Copenhagen University and Humboldt University of Berlin). Since 2015 she is, among other activities, the artistic director of Galerie Wedding – Space for Contemporary Art in Berlin Wedding.
    Solvej Helweg Ovesen

  • Isabel Lewis

    Isabel Lewis (DOM) began her professional career in the world of contemporary dance in 2003. The formal constraints of the proscenium and its relationship to the audience motivated her to begin showing work in alternative spaces such as bars, living rooms, and gardens—all places where she could interact directly with the public.
    Isabel Lewis

  • Ibrahim Mahama

    Ibrahim Mahama (GHA) is an artist and the founder of the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) in Tamale, the capital of the Northern Region of Ghana, which has expanded to become a hub for research and local engagement, with a program of artist residencies and exhibitions that span SCCA and its sister institution, the nearby Red Clay, where Mahama also has a studio.
    Ibrahim Mahama

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