We cordially invite you to join us for a studio visit with the current ‘Borderland Residencies’ fellows Ayo Akingbade and the Apparatus 22 collective, who are exploring the specific context of the city, the surrounding region and the museum during their three-month residency in Aachen. While Akingbade is studying the history of Aachen’s thermal springs and water ecology for a new script, Apparatus 22 will continue their research for the long-term project Positive Tension (in the air), which aims to open up critical conversations and unusual thought-provoking, daydreaming and change processes on and about art institutions.
We are also looking forward to another event with Ayo Akingbade accompanying the ‘Borderland Residencies’ program: On Thursday, November 21, 2024, 7pm, the artist will present her two films, Dear Babylon (2019) and The Fist (2022), at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf. The screening will be followed by a Q&A.
Ayo Akingbade works predominantly with film and installation to address themes of power, urbanism, and stance. Her work has often documented experiences of rapid social change in London, where she was born and raised. Moving between experimental film essays, documentaries, and more traditional narrative, she grounds her practice in a commitment to radical storytelling. Akingbade is particularly interested in looking at the dissonances that emerge between self-presentation and self-fashioning and recently has explored this in self-portraiture and printmaking. Her work has recently been shown at Barbican Centre, London and International Film Festival Rotterdam. Her first major institutional solo exhibition, Show Me The World Mister, opened at Chisenhale Gallery, London in November 2022 and is touring until 2024, venues include Spike Island, Bristol and the Whitworth, University of Manchester.
Apparatus 22 is a collective of daydreamers, citizens of many realms, researchers, poetic activists and (failed) futurologists founded in January 2011 by current members Erika Olea, Maria Farcas, Dragos Olea together with Ioana Nemeș (1979 – 2011) in Bucharest, Romania. Since early 2015 they have been working between Bucharest, Brussels and SUPRAINFINIT utopian universe. In their very diverse works – installations, performances, text based-shapes –, reality is mixed with fiction and storytelling and merge with a critical approach drawing knowledge and experiences from design, sociology, literature and economics. Their work has been exhibited at La Biennale di Venezia 2013 (IT), Kunsthalle Wien (AT), Museion, Bolzano (IT), TRIUMF AMIRIA. Museum of Queer Culture (RO), CIVA, Brussels (BE), MUMOK, Vienna (AT), Ujazdowski Castle – CCA, Warsaw (PL), Autostrada Bienniale Prizren (XK), TIME MACHINE BIENNIAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART, D-0 ARK UNDERGROUND, Konji (BIH), and recently in SMAK Gent (BE), Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (DE), Contemporary Art Museum (MNAC), Bucharest (RO), Contemporary Art Museum Roskilde (DK), West, Den Hague (NL), and Kunsthal Gent (BE) among others.
Borderland Residencies is a project of Kulturraum Niederrhein e.V., coordinated in cooperation with Odapark, center for contemporary art, Kulturbüro der Region Aachen Zweckverband and in collaboration with the participating residencies. Supported by funds from the RKP – Regional Culture Program NRW.
Images: Ayo Akingbade, 2023, photo: Josiah Moktar / Apparatus 22, Kunsthal Gent, Courtesy the artists.
