Women on Aeroplanes is a research-based project, which aims to get an idea of a more comprehensive notion of independence and allows to see and understand a women-informed view on a shattered presence of complicated dependencies.

Looking closely at the long history of transatlantic networks and the struggles for liberation predating the independences on the African continent, women were always important and played all kinds of roles. But their stories are hardly told and their faces remain widely invisible. To recall the notion of independence today can only mean to address the gap between formal independence and a process of decolonization that was simultaneously national and intranational, transnational and international and which remains, in many ways, incomplete.

The first iteration of Women on Aeroplanes at ifa Gallery Berlin, FILTER, comprises a series of lectures dedicated to play with different critical, theoretical and optical filters as a preliminary work for the making of tools (a grammar) to speak to her representation and history making from a different imagery, and thus to filter the cinematic presence of women out of a representation of history. The gallery space becomes an editing room for her picture to unfold from the ephemeral.
Editors, artists, archival researchers and producers, historians and curators, will discuss processes of decision making and criteria that lead to the next cut, the duration of a take, its rhythm. The outcome of this filtering process will be reflected together with the methods of editing as a tool to address her visibility.

PROGRAMME:

Thursday 30 November
19:00 Opening: Welcome address and introduction

Friday 1 December
19:30 Finding Spaces in Between, Uche Okpa-Iroha (Lagos), artist

Saturday 2 December
10:00 Paradise, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa (London), artist
11:00 Women Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary Art: Erasure and Presence, 
Ndidi Dike (Lagos), artist, cultural activist
12:00 Caméléon, Fatoumata Diabaté (Montpellier), artist and curator
14:00 L’oubli n’éxiste pas, mesdames et messieurs, Brigitta Kuster (Berlin),
artist and theoretician
15:00 Discourse of Absence, Jihan El Tahri (Paris), filmmaker and writer
17:00 Under the Radar, Lisl Ponger (Vienna), artist

Sunday 3 December
10:00 Visioning material with Shahira Issa (Berlin), artist and editor
11:30 Processes of Filtering, Kodwo Eshun (London), artist and writer
14:30 Final session with Cara Snyman (Johannesburg), arts and culture
manager

—All events in English—

Participants: Fatoumata Diabaté (Montpellier), artist / Ndidi Dike (Lagos), artist, cultural activist / Jihan El Tahri (Paris), filmmaker and writer / Kodwo Eshun (London), artist and writer / Shahira Issa (Berlin), artist, editor / Brigitta Kuster (Berlin), artist and theoretician / Uche Okpa-Iroha (Lagos), artist / Iheanyichukwu Onwuegbucha (Lagos), researcher / Emily Pethick (London), curator, director of The Showroom / Lisl Ponger (Wien), artist / Cara Snyman (Johannesburg), arts and culture manager / Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa (London), artist.

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Women on Aeroplanes  is a project curated by Annett Busch, Marie-Hélène Gutberlet & Magda Lipska, coproduced by Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth.

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www.ifa.de