Heavy Water | Group exhibition | alexander levy | 27.01.-28.03.2024

until 28.03. | #4180ARTatBerlin | alexander levy is currently showing the group exhibition Heavy Water.

Participating artists :

Diana Akoto-Yip, Justin Barton and Mark Fisher, Julius von Bismarck, Stephanie Comilang, Jessica Edwards and Nik Nowak, Steve Goodman (aka Kode9), Ayesha Hameed, Fabian Knecht, Mischa Leinkauf, Ella Littwitz, The Otolith Group, Su Yu Hsin (and Angela Goh)

Heavy Water | of Coordinates, Containers and Containment sees itself as a mutating encounter between the exhibited works of the participating artists and invites us to to rethink how we might understand these works by reformulating and reframing them in a poetics of relationship and dialog with each other, drawing on the “aquatic” theories of the late Édouard Glissant (1997) and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s concept of a “deep or abyssal implicature” (2019). The exhibition brings together a range of exciting international artists, some from the diaspora, with a generation of Berlin-based artists from the alexander levy gallery, and explores how their approach to the entanglements of a shared global history can contribute to how we can counter the dominant narratives of history to intervene in the future that has been foreseen for us.

Heavy Water | of Containers, Coordinates and Containment considers the entanglements and aftermath of maritime colonial history, racial capitalism and contemporary hypermodernity, using as an index the wet mechanics of both the historical and contemporary global movement of people – willing or forced – and commodities, and of people treated as commodities: Embarkations and disembarkations, Promethean fantasies of the imposition of order, control and domination of unknown ‘new worlds’, in parallel with unimaginable dystopian nightmares of abduction, dispossession and displacement, of clashes over borders, exclusion zones and ownership of space, of displacement caused by war, scarcity, persecution and the acceleration of extreme climate events.

The ambivalence and excess of meaning of the term heavy water characterize the scope and framework of the exhibition and question both real and speculative visual (and acoustic) histories and futures. “Heavy Water”: the process and medium by which neutrons released from atoms are slowed down by the transmutation of water itself, using an isotope of hydrogen to trigger a nuclear chain reaction as a nuclear catastrophe looms once more. “Heavy Water”: The channel, the sea, the ocean burdened with precarious crossings, unsafe passage and unspeakable traumas, and with practices that conceal the most monstrous exploitative processes of capital, becomes haunted, “pregnant with as many dead as living condemned to death” (Glissant, 1997:6), and where the value of a life is differentially calculated. From the slave ship to the transmodal container and its supercargo container ship, from the colonial plantation to the refugee camp, and from the spectral threat of nuclear doom to the escape fantasies of the colonization of space, James Baldwin’s profound and prophetic reflection “Tomorrow you will all be negroes” resonates even more clearly today.

Exhibition dates: Saturday, 27. January – Thursday, 28. Märch 2024

Caption picture: courtesy of the artists and alexander levy, Berlin, photo: Marcus Schneider

Group exhibition Heavy Water – Gallery alexander levy | Contemporary Art – Contemporary Art in Berlin – Exhibitions Berlin Galleries – ART at Berlin