Guided Curatorial Tour and Performance: "Off the Precipice"

As part of the Vienna Art Week

The guided curatorial tour will be followed by the performance “Giwiinoondaagozimin” by Holden Madagame.

Holden Madagame will perform a 20-minute narrative, ritual-based piece involving movement, drumming, and voice, titled “Giwiinoondaagozimin” which means "We want to be heard" in Anishinaabemowin, his indigenous language. Connecting the 7 Fires Prophecy, which leads all peoples of the world to reclaim the old wisdom of their ancestors, they create a portal through which his ancestors speak through time, space, and music.

“As I finally sing and drum as loud as I can, my voice is 1000 times louder. The drum is thousands of drums. My ancestors are all here with me, singing through me. Their drums are all drumming through my drum, and nothing can hurt me.”

Off the Precipice

Artists: Endi Tupja, Giulia Palladini, Holden Madagame, Ivan Marković, Khaled Barakeh, Mahsa Aleph, Marta Popivoda, Melanie Rivera Flores, Razan Sabbagh, Tsēmā Igharas, Zelikha Zohra Shoja

Curated by Center for Peripheries

From Mexico to Albania, from former Yugoslavia to Afghanistan, from East Germany to Syria, there live generations of people whose sense of reality shattered from one moment to the next: a major shift in their country’s political landscape transformed every aspect of their daily life. Off the Precipice is a curated group exhibition with eleven artists from different contexts where such a rupture took place. In their investigations of this change, they draw relationships between various occurrences around the world. When the values you held dear, the art and culture you were embedded in, and the rules that governed your everyday become obsolete, what happens to your sense of self?

In the exhibition space of kunsthalle exnergasse, conceived as a volumetric framework, the artworks are situated along a system of axes that “disperses” them, spreading their elements so that they come into contact with each other, forming new networks of exchange and narratives of solidarity across spacetime.