Resonance catalogue test

In Memory of
Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa

Resonance Exhibition
Curated by Kabila Kyowa Stéphane (DR Congo)
Assisted by Stephen Sing'Andu (Zambia)
Coordinated by Dominic Nshimba (Zambia)
In collaboration with LoCA-
The Livingstone Office for Contemporary Arts
Artworks by Oda Tungodden (Norway)
and Joseph K. Kasau Wa Mambwe (DR Congo)
Participation of artists and curators:
Ahmed Refaat (Egyte)
Anawana Haloba (Zambia)
Andrea Thal (Switzerland)
Emma Walolukau-Wanambwa (UK/Uganda)
Patrick Mudekereza (DR Congo)
Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo (DR Congo)
Duration of Exhibition 27th January to 28th
April 2023 at
The National Art Gallery, Livingstone, Zambia.

Resonance - An epic of the senses, a polyphony of
feelings, a polychrome of voices
On January 27, 2023, the National Gallery of Zambia in Livingstone
hosted the opening of the exhibition Resonance, curated by Kabila
Stéphane, which will remain open for free visitation until April 28 of
the current year. The exhibition is a development of the research
project Geometry of Desire: an Archaeology of Art and Knowledge
initiated by the Curator as part of his Masters in Curatorial Practices
at the University of Bergen, and which sets itself the challenge of
trying to explore the ways in which knowledge is acquired,
expressed and transmitted through art by analyzing the
intersection between knowledge transmission and art experiences
on the African continent.
Based on the colonial library theory of Congolese philosopher V.Y.
Mudimbe and German sociologist Hartmut Rosa's notion of
resonance, the exhibition invites visitors to engage in a reflection on
inherited power structures within knowledge production, and to
consider the possibilities of knowledge transmission through
emancipatory dialogue. Resonance aims to provide a space for the
development of new discourses, bringing different experiences and
perspectives into the conversation.
The first part of the project was built through a series of
conversations between the curator, Kabila Stéphane, and guests
that included artists, curators and art lovers in general: Emma
Walolukau-Wanambwa (UK/Uganda), Patrick Mudekereza (DR
Congo), Anawana Haloba (Zambia), Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo (DR
Congo), Andrea Thal (Switzerland), Ahmed Refaat (Egyte). The
materials and knowledge generated and produced through these
conversations were recorded and completed to be used as the basis
for the Exhibition and for the final publication of the project.
In the second phase, Kabila invited the artists Joseph Kasau (DR
Congo) and Oda Tungodden (Norway) to think about possible
answers to the questions raised by the project through their artistic
practices. Both artists developed their reflections through a
multiplicity of practical and theoretical approaches: from video,
sculpture, drawing to watercolor and painting, from image to text
and vice versa, and to the paths of the Exhibition were added
fundamental contributions in the fields of anthropology and
literature. These reflections culminated in the works that are part of
Resonance and that will be presented in an itinerant way in
different scenarios and cities, opening new spaces for dialogue
between the local community and the artistic field.

In her artistic response, Oda Tungodden presented the "Pillow Project" and
proposed a constant interaction and interchange with those present.
Creating a series of objects that overlap the role of sculpture and a
functional object (beanbags), she invited the audience to spend time with
and in her sculptures - using them to create a space where people can
continue the conversations initiated by the project. Through a series of
conversations with individual interlocutors, Tungodden produced
portraits to be exchanged with individuals for their reflection and
knowledge. Participants received the portraits to keep, in a symbolic
barter of our present day, extending the conversation into homes and
questioning notions of the value of art.
Artist Joseph Kasau, meanwhile, provoked the attendees with the video
"Twenty Years Old. The work questions the time spent in school acquiring
knowledge that does not necessarily respond to the needs of life. With this
work, Kasau reflects on the educational system in Congo and invites the
viewer to consider other spaces for learning practical and emancipating
knowledge. Using excerpts from the texts of thinkers, Kasau opens a
space to question the value of academic knowledge and offers the
audience an opportunity to participate in a discussion questioning what
kind of education is offered to children and young people and how it may
or may not prepare them to face life's challenges.
Resonance establishes a parallel between a mode of aesthetic expression
that recognizes itself in aesthetic components inscribed in an integrated
global existence, which uses simple everyday materials as a support to
build real and meaningful objects, and merges it with an urban and
cosmopolitan mode of aesthetic expression.
Furthermore, the Exhibition is a possibility of opening for other dialogues,
not only artistic and transdisciplinary, but also, and still, intergenerational.
Curatorially, the proposal for dialogue in the gallery space followed a
vaguely chronological linearity, more rigorously characterizable according
to the logic of a journey punctuated by three moments. Initially, we have a
kind of antechamber where the visitors' expectations were mapped
through phrases and texts written on the walls and which invite people to
think and write their thoughts, transforming the exhibition.
The use of various types of archives becomes a strategy to think
diachronically and synchronically about movements and displacements
across various types of historical, geographical, and cultural borders, the
issues inherent to the constructed and mediated nature of history and
memory - whether collective or individual; whether public or private - and
critical reflections around art and the notion of knowledge attesting to
identities. The Exhibition constituted a kind of artistic version of the life
trajectory of the curator and the artists in dialogue with the other
trajectories that were in the Gallery, questioning what notions such as art,
education and knowledge might mean today, in Livingstone and in the
world: what models of sociability and relationship with the world might be
offered in the sense of being adequate and desirable in view of another
possibility of future?

The Exhibition propitiated the meeting between people who could
experience a feeling of belonging in relation to feeling, doing and living
art, including another form of crossing borders: of identity hybridity as a
result of shared humanity and of an interstitial affective cartography.
Beyond the spatial and object manifestations chosen by the curator,
which are at once timeless and historical, identity and diasporic,
Resonance is also, or even primarily, about the performative passage of
bodies through the affective and mnemonic, personal and political
spaces of exchange and experience in the Gallery. In their reflective
displacement when contemplating the objects, in their meditative and
transitory presence by the objects, without possession, without hurry or
ownership, these bodies operate an active re-appropriation of the
spaces, even when languid, of the dwelling, at the image of the constant
reinventions that the passage of several looks wrote and inscribed in
the skin of its walls, in the skeleton of its soul. And even when they walk
as if inattentive among the spaces, there is the voice of the video that
questions what we call knowledge, and a writing that asks us what is
contemporary art for you? Witnesses and participants in an invisible
transformation, these guests of history and memory become characters
in a narrative, visitors who try to map the contradictions between what
they know or think they know.
By inviting participants to take the lead in the Exhibition through their
active participation, the project approaches one of its main objectives,
which is to broaden the discussions about art and knowledge in order to
reach the general public to engage and contribute with their knowledge
and experiences. Resonance encourages the audience to reflect,
resonate and engage with the issues raised. It seeks to open a dialogue
about how contemporary artists and art spaces can participate in
creating alternative modes of learning, knowledge and narratives
that better respond to the challenges of today and the future.
Caire, February 2023.

In the beginning there was the verb ...
Constructive dialogues
In order to achieve the objectives proposed in the Geometry of Desire Project
that later allowed the construction of Resonance, I tried to understand and seek
other possible ways of constructing meaning, identity, history and memory,
through conversations, discussions, listening and discourse analysis, besides
conceptual apprehensions and note-taking.
For this reason I held a series of individual or collective conversations in several
cities, aiming to broaden as much as possible the perspectives on approaches to
knowledge, giving space to voices and epistemes that are generally silenced,
disqualified and/or deformed by normative representations conveyed by
knowledge that only takes literacy into account. In particular, I invited artists
with the most varied practices, in order to obtain a non-centered and, therefore,
as far as possible, non-exclusive view.
I tried, therefore, to value and use
polyphony, based on the localized
community, which allowed me or even
minimally allows the interaction with
different actors and plural references.
The dialogues appeared as a dynamic
of mutual interpellation, by which the
status of the constellation built between
knowledge, representation and truth
became the object of questioning and
revision by subjects, historically
situated, whose dual function of
authorship/authority has not been
recognized as a valid source of
interpellation.

The group conversations in
Livingstone, Zambia and
Lubumbashi, DRC, created the
possibility to directly approach the
theme of art, scrutinize possible
storylines, and produce narratives
from the experiences.
20th, march, 2020. Livingstone office for
Contemprary Art (LoCA), Zambia. Physical
discussion performance with artists, curators
and art lovers. With Isaac KALAMBATA,
KABILA Stéphane, Megan McNamara, Beni
BLOW, Mumbi MWAPE and Joseph.
Discussions like these, more than an
exhaustion of a certain reality, become
in the end tasks of foundation and
construction of a place that the artists
erect and invite us to inhabit as well.
10th, October, 2020. Centre d’art WAZA,
Lubumbashi. Discussion performance with
artists, curators and art critics. With Melissa
Mujinga, Gaettan Kalombo, Kabila Stéphane,
Joseph Kasau, Ngoy Agabus, Dja Kit and Iragi
Elisha.

Patrick Mudekereza, picture from internet.
Patrick Mudekereza conversation
11
Patrick Mudekereza is a writer and curator. He is the
founder and artistic director of Waza Art Center, a
unique independent art center located in Lubumbashi.
He co-founded and directed the first three editions of
Rencontres Picha, Biennale de Lubumbashi
(2008-2015). He participated in the creation and was on
the board of directors of the International Biennial
Association. He has curated several exhibitions. In
2016, he received the Congolese National Prize for Arts
and Culture and in 2017, the Art Letter and Science
Medal. He teaches at the universities of Lubumbashi
and Witwatersrand.

Anawana Haloba conversation
Anawana Haloba, picture from internet.
Anawana Haloba is an artist from Zambia
who lives and works between Oslo and
Livingstone. She´s a co-founded Livingstone
Office for Contemporary Arts (LoCA) in 2014.
LoCA is an artist-initiated non-profit
library, research centre and collective/
collaborative platform for reflections and
an experimental think-tank, exploring
histories (colonial histories, social and
political histories and their legacies) and
how they relate to language and
contemporary art.
Closer Inspection, a two-person show with Roger Kizik at
the Chandler Gallery, Cambridge. He has been guest artist
and lecturer at Artist Proof Studio, Johannesburg, and the
University of Johannesburg, and was artist-in-residence and
curator for the 1995 Johannesburg Biennale. Residencies
include the Scuola lnternazionale di Grafica Venice, the
Vermont Studio Center, and the Franz Masereel Centrum,
Belgium. His work is in the collections of the Boston Public
Library, The Boston Athenaeum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art,
the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, The Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston, and the New York Public Library. Gallery affiliation:
Gallery NAGA.

Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo
conversation
spending time with her two teenage sons, husband, dog and cat. She
moved to Boston to attend the School of the Museum of Fine Arts
Boston, she graduated from UMass Boston, and received her Ed.M in
Arts Education from Harvard. Being part Canadian, she longed to
spend time in Canada and moved to Toronto to complete her MFA at
York University.
"As a mother and a public school art teacher I have had
a window through which to view the pandemic's effect
on families' lives in east Cambridge, Massachusetts. I zoomed
into two hundred and thirty homes to teach art to kindergarteners
through fifth graders. Recording the pain, anxiety and grief over
the past two years has resulted in a series of thirteen relief
carvings I call the Covid Chronicles."
Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo is a visual artist,
curator, and the founder and Executive
Artistic Director of Kin ArtStudio and of
Congo Biennial in Kinshasa, the Democratic
Republic of the Congo. A former student of
the École des Beaux-Arts of Kinshasa, he
has studied visual arts at the École
Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in
Strasbourg and at the Rijksakademie Van
Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. He has
been the commissioner of numerous
exhibitions in Kinshasa and abroad, and his
work has been exhibited internationally in
Africa, Europe, and India.
Vitshois Mwilambwe, picture from internet.

Andrea Thal is a curator with extensive
experience of curating, teaching and
publishing, in which she combines an
international perspective with the local
context. Her engagement with social and
political issues is frequently situated within
a collaborative practice. From 2007 until
2014 she ran Les Complices, a selforganised
space in Zurich. In 2011, she
curated Chewing the Scenery, part of the
Swiss participation in the 45th Venice
Biennale. She has been an active member of
Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC)
since its foundation in 2015. Since 2014,
Andrea Thal has been the artistic director of
Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo,
Egypt.
Andrea Thal conversation
Andrea Thal, picture from internet.

Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa conversation
Emma Wolukau, picture from internet.
Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa was an artist,
a researcher, photographer, and author of
texts and video installations and
convenor of the Africa Cluster of the
Another Roadmap School. Her recent
exhibitions include: Actually, the Dead Are
Not Dead: Bergen Assembly; We Don’t
Need Another Hero; A Thousand Roaring
Beasts and Kabbo Ka Muwal. Her essay,
‘Margaret Trowell’s School of Art or How
to Keep the Children’s Work Really
African’ was published in 2018 in the
Palgrave Handbook on Race and the Arts
in Education.