The Albanian Conference
A project by Anna Ehrenstein
with DNA (Blair and Clint Opara), Vidisha-Fadescha, Rebecca Pokua Korang
at the 4th Lagos Biennial
3 - 10 February 2024, Tawafa Balwewa Square, Lagos
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with text and curatorial inputs by Shaunak Mahbubani:
"2024 is 1984 on speed. The panopticon is in our houses, in our hands. The decentralisation of media should give us power, but even a persistent real-time broadcast of destruction from ground zero is not enough to halt a genocide. As imperial violence keeps retracing its steps in a dizzying spiral, we seek refuge in rekindling the transnational solidarities that were attempted before us.
In the debris of World War II and the formal dismantling of many European colonies, newly independent nations banded together at the Afro-Asian conference at Bandung, Indonesia in 1955. Alongside birthing the non-aligned movement which influenced 'third world' politics for majority of the latter 20th century, the gathering also set in motion robust cultural exchange including the Afro-Asian Writers Conferences (AAWC) held from 1958-1979. These sustained meetings forged what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o called “the links that bind us,” allowing for pertinent trans-national circulations of authors, texts, and ideas in the pre-internet era, a challenge to the cultural hegemony of the Western world.
Inspired by the AAWC, interdisciplinary artist Anna Ehrenstein invited artist-activists Vidisha-Fadescha, DNA (Blair and Clint Opara), and Rebecca Pokua Korang to her home country of Albania in 2021. Repurposing the format of the 'conference' for a generation cynical of institutional stricture, their gathering foregrounded friendship and informal exchange in a part-roadtrip part-big-brother-esque setting. The emergent alliance produced four videos along the coastline of Albania, choosing sites that are being exploited by post-colonial systems of social and ecological extraction. A post-digital aesthetic exudes irreverence on the surface, however, it is backed by the group's experiences in political organizing: be it desiring the end of the militarization of police forces and brutality, like the End-Sars movement DNA have been protesting in Lagos, the abolition of gender and caste systems Fadescha is addressing in the Indian context, the antiracist protests of Pokua's and Ehrenstein's Berlin base or the state capture context of Albania.
Two videos, Wahala and Freedom are music videos for songs by afro-fusion duo DNA critiquing public corruption and digital peer-policing tools. These also feature performances by Fadescha, drawing on their long standing inquiry into the labour of bodies within protest movements. Their articulation of this sustained labour—both within resistance as well as the cultivation of hope—was the trigger for the inclusion of gym equipment as a way to ground the videos in physical experience. The third video, too, speaks of hope, of imagining and seeding radical futures in the face of accelerating dystopia. Borrowing from science-fiction and Occupy strategies, Ehrenstein urges the cohort to articulate contemporary dystopias as a thing of the past, alongside utopian visions as if fulfilled in the present, affirming and energizing their manifestation. Set against imagery of wildfires that ravaged the Albanian countryside concurrent to this trip, the fourth weaves a textual circularity between network effect, colonial law, and queer gathering to deepen and diversify the kinships that this project proposes.
Just as the AAWC moved from Tashkent, to Cairo, Beirut, New Delhi and ahead, the Albanian Conference has hijacked structures of contemporary art to nurture friendships, understand conflict, and draw alignments across neo-colonial experiences. The video works traveled through Albania at Bazament Gallery in Tirana and Ekrani Artit Festival in Shkodra, after being premiered in an exhibition at Berlin's KOW gallery (2021) where Korang also invited dancers from the African and Asian diaspora to respond to and activate the show's themes, centering the notion of the body as archive. Alongside, musicians DNA played concerts at multiple venues in Tirana and Berlin. At the Ural Biennial (2021), locals cooked Nigerian Egusi, channeling discomfort into a trigger for decolonisation. Curator Shaunak Mahbubani joined the group from Survival Kit, Riga (2023), where local Romani activist Ruksana Rudovic shared her experiences in asserting identity through cultural organizing.
For the Lagos Biennial, we invite Lagos based organizer and performer Aaron Ahalu to expand on gender-queer experiences in Nigeria, as well as a performance in collaboration with Oworonshoki Dance Community featuring Obasi Chima, Rejoice Jerry and Bethel Wisdom. Also marking an evolution in physical display, Albanian architect Endri Marku has designed a pavilion that speaks to the architectural influences that were spreading in parallel to the AAWC. Creating a gridded surface of slightly varying cubes, the structure pays homage to the usage of geometric components and facade openings characteristic of modernist building from that era while simultaneously evoking the image of a pixel grid, a nod to the post-digital milieu the Conference is now held within. As if reflecting tensions—between secured identities and a need for further plurality, for one—that act as triggers for continued evolutions of the project, the surface appears to shudder and glitch, seeding-protecting the possibility to imagine "a homeland for those traversing the complex channels of gender's diaspora" and compounded colonial residue."
[1] Rossen Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020).
[2] Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (Verso Books, 2020).
