ways of existing
(becoming – ongoing)

Ways of Existing (becoming-ongoing) begins with processes of writing as an embodied practice, where to write-in-time is to also re-member the breaths of grandmothers, aunts, heroines, reptiles, spirits, … , and blood relatives as active participants in the writing of history. It is a gesture of resistance and a celebratory dance that allows us to imagine, plant, project, mould, map, rewrite, draw, dream and carve out our own future-histories.
In a world where systems of knowledge production continue to focus on individualised progress, the process of creating this exhibition has demanded and required a continuous negotiating of where the “self” begins or ends, how shared experiences of marginalisation echo across geographies, and how systems of power continue to inform ways in which each of these echoes reverberates. The works on the exhibition go beyond recollections of past and present. They merge to imagine future landscapes built out of diary entries, hauntings, historical archives, wishes, and memories that are as fragile as they are certain. To embody the process of becoming-ongoing, the artists employed uncertainty, opacity, play, ephemerality, and fragility as strategies to counter and de-link from forceful and often exploitative political systems brought on by coloniality, racism, western imperialism, and all existing forms of oppression. These strategies and gestures also mirror and make visible the everyday existence of those affected, including human and non-human forms, both living and no longer with us.
To evoke ways of existing as an ongoing state of becoming is to simultaneously break linearity while interrupting the notion of a clear centre and margin. It is to oscillate between various selves in order to multiply resistances while escaping
predictability. It is, most importantly, to insist on healing in order to continue to survive.
Prof. donna Kukama