Mangrove Sunset

With the lights off, the surrounding streets, buildings and sky of Berlin will come into focus, inter-relating the atrium of the Gropius Bau with its environment. Speckled sunlight passes through Daniel Boyd’s windows on the first floor. At 20:29, the sun officially sets and the light will change from pink, yellow, orange, red to blue, reflected in Daniel Boyd’s mirrored floor across the atrium. Eventually, the space will be illuminated by the light that comes from outside, from cars and streetlights and the glow of the city. As eyes adjust, it will be safe to move around but shapes will be less distinct, as in a mangrove, where the distinctions between land, water, banks, river, plant, soil, roots and trees are hard to discern, existing together in a weave.

Mangrove Sunset is part of an ongoing collaboration between Asad Raza and Daniel Boyd. It is also a continuation of the series of Édouard Glissant-inspired projects begun by Raza in 2016, with the exhibition Mondialité co-curated by Raza and Hans Ulrich Obrist with dramaturgy by Ranjana Leyendecker, in which Daniel Boyd’s work was exhibited together with Manthia Diawara’s film One World In Relation. Boyd was also part of Raza and Obrist’s Glissant-inspired exhibitions Where Oceans Meet (2019), Museum of Art and Design, Miami and This language which is every stone (2022), Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. Boyd’s work was featured within Raza’s work Absorption in 2019 in Sydney.

Rund Alarabi is an artist and researcher. Through the use of various media such as video, images and text, she inquires about the imagined and the soon-to-be. By exploring the semiotics of collective memory and delving into common linguistic tendencies, shared experiences and the contested spaces of sentiment, she peers into the ways structures outpour from such spatial and lingual habits. Her research, work and interests revolve around language and pictorial interpretations, how they intersect and how such intersections affect one in deriving meaning from both.

Sophie Bourel is an actress in theater, cinema and radio. She makes experimental films and performances that confront archival documents and contemporary fiction. Another aspect of her research concerns poetry, put into voice or on stage in collaboration with Etel Adnan at the FIAC Grand Palais or at the Centre Pompidou Metz. She has worked with Édouard Glissant who created for her a montage of his dramatic poem Les Indes. She has just created for the European Parliament an epic retracing the construction of the Europe of women and preparing a performance on Suzanne Lenglen. More information on http://www.laminutieuse.fr

Daniel Boyd lives and works on Gadigal and Wangal Country, Sydney. He has participated in major biennales and exhibitions, including the Dhaka Art Summit (2023); Okayama Art Summit (2022); Kathmandu Triennale (2022); Mondialité at the Boghossian Foundation, Villa Empain, Brussels (2017); National Indigenous Art Triennial, Canberra (2017); 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016); 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014). In 2022, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, presented a major survey exhibition of Boyd’s work. RAINBOW SERPENT (VERSION) is the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work in Europe.

Manthia Diawara is a distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Film at the New York University and a prolific writer and filmmaker. His essays on art, cinema and politics have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, LA Times, Libération, Mediapart and Artforum. He is the author of two acclaimed memoirs: In Search of Africa (Harvard University Press, 2000) and We Won’t Budge: An African in the World (Basic Books, 2008). Diawara’s most recent films include: Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom (2023), AI: African Intelligence (2022), An Opera of the World (2017), Édouard Glissant, One World in Relation (2010).

Rhea Dillon is an artist and poet based in London. Her first institutional solo exhibition opens at Tate Britain in London in June 2023. Recent exhibitions include We looked for eyes creased with concern, but saw only veils at Sweetwater, Berlin (2023); The Sombre Majesty (or, on being the pronounced dead) at Soft Opening, London (2022) and Love at Bold Tendencies, London (2022). She presented Catgut – The Opera at Park Nights 2021 in the Serpentine Pavilion, with a book forthcoming with Worms.

Vienna Gist, a Bay Area California native, is currently based in Berlin. Her works explore mind, body and soul arranged through sculpture, performance and media. The artist received her degree from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (2018) and completed an exchange year at the Academy of Fine Arts Hamburg (2018).

Olga Hohmann is a writer and performer living in Berlin Kreuzberg. In 2020, she published her first book What I (don’t) remember. In 2022, she published her second book, The Overview Effect. Her new book 10 Points for Passion will be released in the fall of 2023.

Lama El Khatib lives, works and studies in Berlin. Trained in architecture and studied art history and philosophy at the American University of Beirut, she is currently pursuing an MA in philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin. Since 2018, she has worked in the context of the The Whole Life Academy – an experimental collaborative initiative invested in developing archival research methodologies in relation to contemporary socio-political urgencies – at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

Prem Krishnamurthy is a designer, author, and educator. His multifaceted work explores the role of art as an agent of transformation at an individual, collective and structural level. This manifests itself in exhibitions, images, performances, publications, systems, talks, texts and workshops. He currently organises the Departmentof Transformation, an itinerant workshop that practices collaborative tools for social change. His book-length epistolary essay OnLetters was published in 2022.

Şehnaz Layıkel Prange is a Gropius Bau Friend. The Gropius Bau Friends are people specialising in art education. They are present in our exhibitions several days a week, and are always available to help visitors with any questions.

Djon Mundine OAM FAHA is a proud Bandjalung man from the Northern Rivers of New South Wales. Mundine is a curator, writer, cultural mentor, artist and activist and is celebrated as a foundational figure in the criticism and exhibition of contemporary Aboriginal art. Mundine has held many senior curatorial positions in both national and international institutions. He received the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to the promotion and development of Aboriginal arts, crafts and culture in 1993. In 2020, he won The Australia Council of the Art’s Red Ochre Award for lifetime achievement.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London and Senior Advisor at LUMA Arles. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show World Soup (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 350 shows.

Anna von Raison is a pianist, composer, music producer and vocalist based in Berlin. She studied Jazz in Mannheim (HfM), Amsterdam (CvA) and New York (Prof. Jason Moran/MSM). As well as working as a recording artist, she writes music for moving image and performs with her avantgarde-pop project AVR. In 2022 she worked with Asad Raza as a music supervisor and producer on his work Delegation for the FRONT Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art.

Asad Raza creates dialogues and rejects disciplinary boundaries in his work, which conceives of art as a metabolic, active experience. Using actions and processes such as soil-making, tennis and horticulture, his projects create encounters within and beyond the exhibition setting. They have been realised by institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kaldor Public Art Projects, Sydney; the Serpentine Galleries, London; Kunsthalle Portikus; Urbane Kunst Ruhr, Essen; the Lahore Biennale and his one-bedroom apartment.

Sylvie Séma Glissant is an artist whose work is exhibited under the name of Sylvie Séma. She is co-author with Édouard Glissant of La Terre magnétique. Les Errances de Rapa Nui, l'île de Pâques (Seuil, 2007). She has been the Director of the Institut du Tout-monde since its founding by Édouard Glissant in 2006. With him, she organised the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe and numerous international colloquia. The Institut du Tout-monde composes cultural and scientific events relating to the art collection of the Musée du Tout-Monde. Most recently in collaboration with the Édouard Glissant Art Fund in Martinique.