Re/Projections: Video, Film, and Performance for the Rotunda In-Between Days March 19–April 19 Christian Nyampeta April 30
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RE/PROJECTIONS: VIDEO, FILM, AND NOW SHOWING PERFORMANCE FOR THE ROTUNDA CHRISTIAN NYAMPETA: IN-BETWEEN DAYS MARCH 19–APRIL 19 SOMETIMES IT CHRISTIAN NYAMPETA APRIL 30–JUNE 21 WAS BEAUTIFUL RAGNAR KJARTANSSON JULY 2–12 WU TSANG JULY 23–SEPTEMBER 6 APRIL 30–JUNE 21 RE/PROJECTIONS: VIDEO, FILM, AND PERFORMANCE FOR THE ROTUNDA Conceived amid the historic social and cultural transformations of the past year, Re/Projections: Video, Film, and Performance for the Rotunda rethinks the Guggenheim’s iconic architecture as a site of assembly, reflection, and amplification. The series comprises four distinct projects that occupy the entire rotunda one at a time. A screening program of videos from the museum’s permanent collection is followed by site-specific, immersive installations by artists Christian Nyampeta, Ragnar Kjartansson, and Wu Tsang. Each of these varied presentations draws on the building’s unique capacity for distanced gathering to create frameworks for dialogue and mutual care. The experimental approach behind Re/Projections is designed to privilege multiple voices while remaining nimble in a moment of economic and public health crises. With its focus on video, film, and performance, the series also celebrates acts of embodiment, storytelling, and interpersonal connection. As audiences convene in the Guggenheim’s landmark space, they will encounter new visions for navigating tensions between collective and individual experience, asking how we might live together better in an increasingly polarized world. #ReProjections To learn more about the exhibition, download the Guggenheim Digital Guide, available for free on the Bloomberg Connects app. Look for this icon 300 700 Español 800 普通话 Support for Re/Projections: Video, Film, and Performance for the Rotunda has been provided by The Mondriaan Fund, Yang Lan, and Yitong Wang. NOW SHOWING CHRISTIAN NYAMPETA: SOMETIMES IT WAS BEAUTIFUL APRIL 30–JUNE 21 Artist, filmmaker, and writer Christian Nyampeta conceives and organizes screenings, workshops, performances, convenings, and publications to encourage collective feeling, cooperative thinking, and mutual action. Expanding upon Senegalese writer and film director Ousmane Sembène’s idea of cinema as cours du soir, or “evening classes,” for this presentation Nyampeta transforms the Guggenheim’s iconic rotunda into a “night school.” Through Nyampeta’s vision, Sembène’s view that film provides a learning environment for the working class is manifested in the artist’s recontextualization of their shared traditions of spirituality, spoken word, song, rhythm, sensuality, and storytelling. By utilizing cinema’s collective potential to generate public meaning, Nyampeta dramatizes such traditions in artworks that bring together echoes and dimensions usually separated by either the physical limits of life and death, or by conflicting cultural and political affiliations. Nyampeta presents the United States premiere of his 2018 video Sometimes It Was Beautiful at the center of the rotunda. The video’s narrative revolves around a group of friends gathering to watch and critique films made by Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist in the Congo between 1948 and 1952. The resulting group discussion highlights enduring tensions surrounding social transformation, cultural property, and who has the right to representation. Mirroring the dialogue and exchange that take place in the film, interludes of music, poetry, readings, screenings, and talks by the artist’s guests and collaborators are staged on the museum’s ramps, where Nyampeta has designed and installed furniture and made graphic interventions. Drawing from the fundamental precariousness of existence shared by diasporic communities across different histories, varied experiences, and immense geographic expanses, the program explores proposals for reimagining the earth as a whole and a shelter for all who inhabit it. Christian Nyampeta: Sometimes It Was Beautiful is organized by Xiaoyu Weng, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Associate Curator. Hear Christian Nyampeta discuss his work: 301 701 Español 801 普通话 Support for Christian Nyampeta: Sometimes It Was Beautiful has been provided by Yang Lan and Yitong Wang. CENTER PROJECTION: Christian Nyampeta (b. 1981, Kigali, Rwanda), Sometimes It Was Beautiful, 2018. Color video, with sound, 37 min., edition 3 of 6. Commissioned by Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by Will Wang 2021.2; with an intermission program of Boda Boda Lounge video screenings and recorded conversations and activities THE NIGHT SCHOOL Following Senegalese film director, producer, and writer Ousmane Sembène’s notion of cinema as cours du soir, Christian Nyampeta further imagines the “night school” at the Guggenheim as a way of gathering contradictions while suspending antagonism. During the intermissions between showings of the film Sometimes It Was Beautiful, which screens on the hour, the center projection features recordings of conversations and activities of invited collaborators, including poets, scholars, and writers. This intermission program extends the idea of film as a “night school” into contexts particular to New York and the United States by engaging cultural practitioners based here. Drawing from the diasporic discourses that have emerged from different histories, varied experiences, and immense geographic expanses, these interludes ask: How might we layer memories that are sometimes contradictory, even as they are all true? How might we reconcile a singular national and official memory with multiple individual and collective memories? Participants in the series respond to these questions through music, poetry, readings, screenings, and conversations, many of which took place within the museum in spaces designed by the artist, which are modeled after primary mission schools. These interludes aspire to a new understanding of the diasporic as a global condition also applicable to those who remain in their native lands, whereby existing ways of life are converted through forceful virtual displacement and intense environmental transformations. The interludes program also includes the New York premiere of Boda Boda Lounge, a cross- continental video art festival that takes place simultaneously at more than fifteen spaces across the African continent every two years. Co-initiated by Centre d’art Waza in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, the festival’s title is a pidgin word in Kiswahili that means “border.” Boda Boda Lounge was created out of the belief that video art creates mobility, movement, and meaningful exchanges between different contexts, and allows physical boundaries to be transcended and intimate introspection and contemplation to be generated collectively. THE TRANSCRIPTION CENTRE This gallery functions as an informal recording room modeled after the Transcription Centre, a recording studio established in 1962 in London, United Kingdom, by British scholar, critic, and curator Dennis Duerden. By 1977, the Transcription Centre evolved to become an archive of taped interviews with African writers, and distributed these tapes to radio stations in Africa and elsewhere for broadcast. Duerden was also one of the illustrators for the publications of the African Writers Series (AWS). AWS has ensured the presence of international voices in the literary field and brought critical attention to major writers from Africa since its initial publication in 1962. The series represents an effort to create a forum for many post-independence African writers. Moreover, it facilitates the publication of original African literature, providing further texts through which African universities are able to address the colonial bias in literary education. Like the many print titles from the AWS, the Transcription Centre’s rich and varied recordings testify to an intense moment of invention that African artists had newly found within the possibility of change and hope. These writers’ works—sources of continued intellectual inspiration for Nyampeta—such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Bessie Head’s Maru (1971), and Tchicaya U Tam’si’s Le mauvais sang (1955), were also informed by pressing historical conditions: Their thinking and aesthetic engagements emerged in the aftermath of World War II, into which writers such as Ousmane Sembène had been drafted as members of the British and French armies. Focusing on recording and drawing as pedagogical methods for the transmission and transformation of language and dominant knowledge, Nyampeta’s installation for this gallery reimagines the Transcription Centre. His approach reinvents creolization, in his own words, as “a montage of cuts, edits, and rearrangements of cultural heritage into an ongoing layering practice.” Accordingly, the artist’s large drawings in this gallery reference illustrations from a variety of sources, including the AWS, government-issued schoolbooks for French learning previously used in primary and secondary schools in Rwanda, and basic Kiswahili learning books. The recordings conducted here during the run of the exhibition feature invited speakers and are supplemented by the artist’s own sound and musical compositions. They will be broadcast on the radio in New York and beyond, including on WFMU in Jersey City, New Jersey; NTS in London; and Chimurenga’s Pan African Space Station in Cape Town, South Africa. HAND OF LIGHT CARESSED MY EYELIDS The drawings presented on the museum’s ramps are glimpses of Christian Nyampeta’s ongoing