IBA Stage: 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts – Beya Othmani, Exit Frame Collective 

Left: Beya Othmani: Photo by Iman Salem. Right: Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh: Photo by Urška Boljkovac. MGLC Archive.

IBA Stage: 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts
December 11, 2023 (Monday)
3:00 pm (Ljubljana/GMT+1)

From the void came gifts of the cosmos as the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts is titled, has been realised through the participation of a wide curatorial team under the directorship of Ibrahim Mahama. We are extremely pleased to have the possibility of discussing with two of them their approach to this project and gain some further insight into their collaboration as it unfolded in Ljubljana.

Representing Exit Frame Collective we are happy to welcome again Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh who not too long ago joined us to discuss his contribution to the 12th Edition of Rencontre de Bamako. Together with Kwasi we will also have the honour to have with us Beya Othmani, independent curator and researcher based in Tunis.

Beya’s pracice focuses on exhibition histories, the construction of racial identities in the arts and state-led exhibition-making practices in colonial and post-colonial Africa. She is also a member of Archive Sites, a platform for publishing and cultural research, where she co-curates the programme Publishing Practices, an ongoing inquiry around the production and dissemination of printed matters and a learning site for radical publishing. She co-curated the exhibition and residency programme This Bridge Can Get Us There at Archive Sites Berlin in 2021, which looked at the potential of publishing as a subversive and emancipatory practice through the prism of transnational feminist methodologies and anticolonial thought. In 2021, she curated Alger Insolite, an online programme, as part of a research project on African photography initiated by Untitled Duo and the Rencontres Photographiques d’Arles. Alger Insolite was thought of as an open conversation around the politics of space and their entanglement with the image, taking the neighbourhood of Algiers-center as an entry point. In March 2020, she co-curated the Sonsbeek Council #1 in Tunis on labour and its sonic ecologies. Previously, she was a member of the Berlin-based art space SAVVY Contemporary, where she co-produced the event series Listening Session: Untraining the Ear and the Untraining the Ear festival. She has been part of the curatorial team of various exhibitions, including The Dog Gone Death at Dak’Art 13 Biennale (2018) and Shadow Circus for the Forum Expanded of the Berlinale (2019). She is currently a recipient of the CAORC/Andrew Mellon Art History fellowship.

Exit Frame emerged as a collective in 2012 after years of friendship, informal conversations and collaborations between its five members, who are all based in Ghana: Adwoa Amoah, Ato Annan, Bernard Akoi-Jackson, Kelvin Haizel and Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh. The group operates within the surplus of the collision between art and pedagogy. Within this surplus is where the collective tests out what possibilities of emancipation art as such offers a native of the 21st century. For the collective, art exists as the starting point for asking broader questions about material and immaterial universes. Exit Frame curated the group exhibition Of Materials and Things (2021) and co-organised the 11-day festival Pile au Rendezvous with La Condition Publique as part of Saison Africa 2021 in France. Besides individual and networked projects spanning the fields of new materiality, pedagogy, curating, art administration, and artisanship – both in Ghana and abroad – Exit Frame inaugurated the annual peer-led pedagogical project and inoperative art school called CritLab in 2020 as part of its efforts to expand the critical intellectual infrastructure of professional art practice in Ghana. Presently in its fourth year, CritLab is a combined residency and professional development programme designed for artists, critics and curators from Africa and other parts of the world.

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