Paul Maheke: In Me Everything is Already Flowing

For his first solo exhibition in Berlin, Paul Maheke quotes philosopher Luce Irigaray “In me everything is already flowing,” as it appears in Astrida Neimanis’ text Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water.

Hydrofeminism—which is an exploration of our biological commonality and its roots in water—is part of a set of texts and studies that have formed the basis of his research for this exhibition. He was particularly struck by on-going research that claims that memory can exist in water and that psychological trauma might be transmitted from generation to generation via our DNA. One such study, carried out by Masaru Emoto and Luc Montagnier (Nobel Prize laureate for the discovery of HIV), discovered water’s molecular responsiveness to emotions.

As such, Maheke treats water as both a subjective and affective substance that choreographs relations between bodies and subjects. He further explores notions such as fluidity and formlessness through the use of dance as both a strategy of resistance and a thinking process; one that is in flux and allows for indetermination. The exhibition speculates on embodied histories and the exploration of physical memory through movement. It is ultimately grounded in an artistic exploration of queer blackness that encompasses dance and music making. These have become coping mechanisms through which the queer black body operates as an archive, using its fluids as pathways to knowledge and its transmission.

In Me Everything is Already Flowing is the first iteration of a series of exhibitions and performances that will take place over 2017, in London (What Flows Through and Across at Assembly Point, 17 Jan. – 25 Feb. 2017) and in Paris (Acqua Alta, Sultana Gallery, April-May 2017), alongside the presentation of three related performance works at Union Pacific (Aug. 2016), The Showroom (Nov. 2016) and Tate Modern (Mar. 2017).

A publication with a text by Tom Hastings will accompany the exhibition.

This exhibition has been made possible with the generous support of the Institut Français, Germany.

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