Sinethemba Twalo and Jabu Arnell

Sinethemba Twalo and Jabu Arnell – A Kind of Black: an emergent poetics of the imminent unknown, 2018, courtesy Sinethemba Twalo and Jabu Arnell

A Kind of Black: an emergent poetics of the imminent unknown (2018) is an ongoing conversation between Jabu Arnell and Sinethemba Twalo. Imagined as a fancy footwork of wills whilst balancing on the edge of a visceral moment of bare activity, the palimpsest of contingent statements reflect on our propinquity to and/or detachment from objects—their capacity to impel our becoming or compound a feeling of loss. How might we apprehend the slippery nature of becoming when one is aggravated by an urgent desire for orbit and/or sometimes an imminent feeling of collapse when faced with a peculiar encounter?

Our ongoing research-led process attempts to inquire into the politics of affect. Understanding affect as a familiar entanglement and/or the entangled familiar, the works trace an incontrovertible impulse. A Kind of Black: an emergent poetics of the imminent unknown (2018) revels in a certain suspension of disbelief. This suspension, a momentary hallucination borne of an anxious two-step (a dance with shadows) interrogates affect and desire; desire as political gesture; desire as an affect and/or affective desire and its potentiality. A commemorative space bounded to a cruel and optimistic desire, the work (re)considers the nebulous encounter between that thing and this body, a predicament both vagarious and chaotic.

—Sinethemba Twalo

    Venue:
  • KW Institute for Contemporary Art

LIST OF WORKS

A Kind of Black: an emergent poetics of the imminent unknown, 2018

An Epigraph of (Im)possibility (Cri du Cœur), 2018
Video, color, sound

Flaccid and Erect (unfulfilled desire), 2018
Reed, bamboo, wood, sponge, cloth, sound

Throwing Shade Black Unicorn, 2018
Video, color, sound, speaker cones, 2′33′′ Sound Kari Kra by Ismaël Imansoeradi

Abandoning the Scene of History (Petit Marronage), 2018
Sound, 16′03′′

Real Time (Too), 2018
Text, image

Throwing Shade Black Unicorn, 2018
Video, sound 52′′

It’s Out Of My Hands (The Package), 2018
Mixed media

All works Courtesy Sinethemba Twalo and Jabu Arnell
Spatialization and mix by Hugo Esquinca Villafuerte
Thanks to Ismaël Imansoeradi, Rosalie Ravensteijn and Toon Beerens

Commissioned and coproduced by Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art
With the support of Ammodo Foundation; Mondriaan Fund; Botschaft des Königreichs der Niederlande, Berlin; Thami Mnyele Foundation