What happens when we sift through history and its dark repositories? The exhibition FLIGHT, curated by Tawanda Appiah at Malmö Konsthall presents burning, critical and unrelentingly defiant artworks by Kudzanai Chiurai, Frida Orupabo and Eric Magassa.

FLIGHT unfolds in a sequence of scenes that set the viewer in fluid time and place. Each installation is constructed from painstaking excavation and purposefully veers in and out of the past and present. The exhibition grapples with dissonance; beauty and grit, colonialism and freedom, and that which is yet to come.

The word flight evokes a myriad of visual metaphors and sensations – flying, breaking free, falling. In this exhibition it works as a linguistic signifier and as a place for the viewer to orient themselves in and engage with the expressions presented. Its omnipresence is there to entice and lead into worlds of tangible narratives, abstractions and critical fabulations. FLIGHT is formed through a range of mediums including collage, photography, sound, video and printed matter. The effect created is an immersive site of frequency, rhythm and vividness.

A common thread ties the artists’ works together: their emphasis on remembrance and reckoning. Throughout the exhibition the automatic response of fight-flight-freeze and its effects on everyday life can also be discerned. Kudzanai Chiurai’s archival work, The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember, transports us to Pan-African liberation struggles against colonial rule. The work is all-consuming and pulsates with resistance. Frida Orupabo presents an assemblage of collage works that depict abstracted Black figures that are eerily present and unflinching. Eric Magassa’s large-scale installation opens passages into vastness. He distorts and disturbs, forging ways outside of conformity and symmetry. The impressions in his collages are far-reaching and anachronistic.

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