« Never Cross the Same River Twice », curated by the Franco-Togolese Kisito Assangni and the Greek-British Ariana Kalliga, is an exhibition uniting video, film and installation. Presented until September 25, 2021 at space52 in Athens, Greece, this group exhibition began as a traveling research project in 2020.
This exhibition connects two expanses that unfold in pairs, following the new video practices of 11 contemporary artists from around the world.
« Never Cross the Same River Twice » encompasses large-scale videographies that aim to support new kinds of transnational and global encounters.
The selected video works are sites of visual contestation, realist in style with narratives that review the past, guarantee chronicles and ancestors, decolonize the brain and the creative mind.
Alluding to Heraclitus’ river, which viewed the way of life as a substance in constant transition and vacillation, the title of the exhibition is a call to imagine new natural, political, and administrative foundations and frameworks established. In examining the restrictions of film as activism, much of the work of interest reflects what Argentine scholar Walter D. Mignolo calls the important epistemic challenge and decolonial opportunity to remake a just future.
She opens up shattering ghostly results of new imaginaries. Accompanied by an equivalent series of bi-monthly screenings and lectures, including an evening hosted by the Athens School of Fine Arts.
This exhibition hopes to extend and densify the interconnected themes woven into the presentation program: history, filiation, ethnography, otherness, memory, colonization, Afrofuturism, women’s liberation, diaspora, personality, globalization, industrialism, myth.
Various artists such as Monica de Miranda, Moataz Nasr, Emo de Medeiros, Harold Offeh, Longinos Nagila, Ahmet Öğüt, Gilivanka Kedzior, Marinella Senatore, Daisuke Takeya, Sammy Baloji, Lazara Rosell Albear, Valentina Karga, Stefanos Tsivopoulos, Mary Zygouri, Ariana Papademetropoulos, Eva Papamargariti, and George Drivas, are participants on the project.
The exhibition « Never Cross the Same River Twice » is open at space52 Athens until September 25, 2021
