Voices Unbound: Artists in Conversation

^{Header image: Studio Tegene Kunbi. Photo: Tegene Kunbi}

"Voices Unbound" at Lenbachhaus presents conversations with artists that afford audiences an emotional access to contemporary art practices. The talk series embodies a discussion atmosphere mirroring current paradigmatic shifts that take place in the world of contemporary art: from a eurocentric understanding towards a consciousness that transgresses its confining perimeters and thoroughly questions its inherent aesthetic rules.¹ This requires a particular attention to the social and political conditions that have shaped and continue to influence each participant’s practices. Therefore, "Voices Unbound" is also occupied with said parameters and their role in the artistic evolution or biography of the series’ interlocutors.

The series, with each episode lasting around 60 minutes and shared on Lenbachhaus’ YouTube channel, showcases artists working across disciplines (performance, film/video, drawing and painting) hailing from France, Martinique, Guadeloupe and England, predominantly practicing within the larger global African Diaspora: Jimmy Robert (Germany/France/Guadeloupe), Julien Creuzet (France/Martinique) and SERAFINE1369 (England).

Jimmy Robert’s practice centralizes the body and its personification through materialism, often paper, playing out at the intersections of the art object, performance, and the history of art. In Robert’s playful transgression of genres, the way he overlaps two- and three dimensional structures that permeate the most diverse forms of media, for example film or photography, he transforms the principle of collage and decollage into a contemporary visual grammar. 

Julien Creuzet’s interdisciplinary approach furthermore encompasses sculpture, poetry, music, video, and animation challenging the deeply layered and complex French colonial history. The artist employs performative aspects and music/song alongside his sculptural works often culminating in a complex montage or environments. 

SERAFINE1369 understands dance and movement as an oracular practice. Their work is informed by an interest in the invisible systems and structures that choreograph bodies in life. The intense atmospheres SERAFINE1369’s work conjures up are often caused by the tensions between things that make meaning, implicating the bodies of audiences as well as performers.

Host Magnus Elias Rosengarten is an author and curator focusing on the complex relationships between body and space in contemporary art. Central questions of his work are: Which spaces make some bodies a political subject and others not? Who has the power to define bodies and what realities are created in this sense? Non-Western epistemologies are pillars and toolboxes for his work, especially when it comes to the urgent task of making visible bodies and narratives that are constantly moving in the diaspora.

The group’s common denominator is a strong focus on the human body as a medium and reference with which to negotiate existential concerns such as belonging, identity and migration. Situated in the midst of the artists’ creation processes the series conveys, apart from the intellectual exchange, an emotional access to the group’s oeuvres and grants an experiential dimension for audiences to engage with contemporary art. 

The project’s cover image depicts Ethiopian artist Tegene Kunbi in his Berlin studio, winner of the Grand Prix Léopold, at the 2022 Dak’Art Biennale in Senegal and serves as allegory for the talk series—"Voices Unbound: Artists in Conversation" stresses the artistic process and attempts to find language for it in intimate, longer than average conversations. Moreover, Kunbi’s practice is nurtured by a variety of visual grammars, among them Ethiopian icon painting and western abstraction, forming its own idiom. This eclectic fusion of references summons the spirit of "Voices Unbound: Artists in Conversation" as a conversational space that trespasses aesthetic borders and ideas of purity.

All in all, "Voices Unbound: Artists in Conversation" critically interrogates who has the power to speak within the societal spheres of culture and art.² Therefore, the artists’ voices and their presence in these unfolding dialogues play an eminent part within ongoing transformation processes of European museum institutions.

---

<sup>1. Fred Moten (2007) Preface for a solo by Miles Davis, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 17:2, 217-246
2. Kilomba, Grada, Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism, Unrast Verlag, 2023.</sup>