The Centre Does Not Hold

Hopscotch (The Centre of the Sun's Radiance), sound installation, exhibited at After the Last Sky, de Appel, Amsterdam, 2023. Image credit: Özgür Atlagan. Courtesy of the artist.

Hopscotch (The Centre of the Sun's Radiance), sound installation, exhibited at After the Last Sky, de Appel, Amsterdam, 2023. Image credit: Özgür Atlagan. Courtesy of the artist.

upcoming
23 Mar – 20 Apr

Inas Halabi

The Centre Does Not Hold is an exhibition in three parts by the Palestinian artist Inas Halabi. Across a sound installation and two moving image works that address different regions mired in colonial power structures, Halabi considers the landscape as a living archive from which to excavate the (in)visible sediments of trauma and slow violence. In its invitation to look closely, The Centre Does Not Hold surverys the malleability of sound and image, and in doing so, unearths histories hiding in plain sight.

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Installed at Enjoy is Hopscotch (The Centre of the Sun’s Radiance) (2021), a seven chapter soundscape from which the exhibition takes its title. A two-channel sound installation with video, the work takes listeners on a sonic journey across two continents—Africa and Europe—to explore how histories of labour tied to the development of the railways are embedded in the contemporary landscape. Foregrounding a kind of opacity, or a refusal of the primacy of visual representation, the work considers how sound can transform into an image. Through field recordings, oral histories and radio broadcasts, Halabi traces the extraction and transport of uranium from the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo to a former UMHK-owned* uranium refinery in Olen, Belgium. This journey across language, land and interlocutor examines how the past continues to inflect the present. Borrowing its title and structure from Julio Cortázar’s eponymous novel as well as the playground game, Hopscotch shifts between several chapters whose beginnings and endings are never the same, disrupting the notion of linear time that structures historical as well as train-based narratives. The second part of the title is taken from Patrice Lumumba’s independence speech of 1960, in which he vows to make the Democratic Republic of Congo “the centre of the sun’s radiance for Africa,” and to “keep watch over the lands of our country so that they truly profit her children,” reflecting the ongoing struggle for economic as well as political independence from colonial oppressors. 

*Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, a Belgian mining conglomerate that controlled and operated the (primarily copper) mining industry in parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1906 and 1966. An iteration of the corporation is now known as Umicore.

Curated by Jess Clifford

Inas Halabi
Inas Halabi (b.1988, Palestine) is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her practice is concerned with how social and political forms of power are manifested and the impact that overlooked, or suppressed, histories have on contemporary life. She holds an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London, and completed the De Ateliers artist residency in Amsterdam in 2019. Recent exhibitions and screenings include: Luleå Biennial, Sweden (2024); Reel Palestine Dubai (2024), TAVROS Athens (2024), Sharjah Film Platform 6, UAE (2023); Beirut Art Centre (2023); Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (2023); de Appel, Amsterdam (2023), Showroom, London (2022); Europalia Festival, Brussels (2021), Silent Green Betonhalle, Berlin (2021); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2020); and Film at Lincoln Center, USA (2020). She lives and works between Palestine and the Netherlands.


Jess Clifford
Jess Clifford is a writer, editor and curator from Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, to where she has returned after several years working in art galleries and museums in London, most recently for Tate. She works for CIRCUIT Artist Moving Image and is the editor of their forthcoming survey publication. Recent curatorial projects include To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space (2023); and I’m so into you, The Physics Room (2024).

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Hiraeth

Video still. Courtesy of the artists.

Video still. Courtesy of the artists.

upcoming
23 Mar – 20 Apr

Holly Walker, Sylvan Spring

Hiraeth is a Welsh word describing a spiritual longing for a place that we have never been. It is the lost ancient places we imagine our ancestors would stomp their feet into their lands and the grief we struggle to locate in our bodies—a dislocated homesickness for a motherland we have never belonged to. The offerings of this exhibition illustrate the artists’ intimate and awkward rituals of becoming truly Pākehā—tangata Tiriti on their haerenga towards becoming familiar with the layers of their cultural identities and realities on this whenua and in relation to its people.

 

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Holly Walker and Sylvan Spring have collaborated on a video work ritualising a cèilidh, a Scottish and Irish dance tradition. The embodied performance of cèilidh connects people to their whakapapa through movement, whilst demonstrating the foreign disconnect felt as Pākehā. This work steps towards untangling inherited colonial individualism and severance from cultural ancestry by loving and recognising one another, healing together and finding humble joys in the therapeutic practices of ancestral accountability and responsibility. The dances featured in the video are the Gay Gordons from Scotland, the Waves of Tory from Ireland, and Cylch y Cymru from Wales. 

Walker has contributed a collection of photographic works which document an endurance practice of navigating landscapes in Te Ika-a-Māui with a concrete found object in the shape of an ‘I’. This series pushed her to further explore her relationship to the institution of settler colonialism and Pākehā identity. The work acknowledges and embraces the paradox of always belonging to both of these cultural identities. Walker carries the weight of her ‘I’ with her, through deserts and construction sites—an uncomfortable assertion in the environment, while a necessary attachment and weight to bear.  

The video work is accompanied by a looped audio recording of Spring singing the traditional Irish song ‘Óró, sé do bheatha ‘bhaile'. This song was used prominently by the Irish people during both the Jacobite rising of 1745 and the Easter rising of 1916, as a protest song opposing their ongoing colonisation by the English. 

 

Ngā mihi ki a Fraser Walker who filmed and edited Cèilidh, 2024, and Nayte who photographed I, 2024.

Sylvan Spring
Sylvan Spring is a Pākehā (Eire, Alba, England, Deutschland) writer and occasional music maker who has been shaped by the lands and waters of Te Whanganui-a-Tara and Te Awakairangi. Their first book of poetry Killer Rack was released this February through Te Herenga Waka University Press.

Holly Walker
I tipu ake au i Te Puke. Kei te noho au ki Pōneke ināinei. He Pākehā ahau, he Tangata Tiriti ahau, ko Holly tōku ingoa. Holly Walker is a multimedia artist, recently practicing in performance, photography, sculpture, video and written works. Holly’s work subjects her body as a performative foundation to explore and represent politics of identity.

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