22.SEP.2011 22.OCT.2011
ANAWANA HALOBA
MY LIPS ARE SEALED
Anawana Haloba: born in 1978, Livingstone, Zambia. Lives and works in Oslo, Norway
Anawana Haloba works with performance, video and sound installations, using her own body as a medium. Haloba’s work explores the positions and relations of different communities within varied political, social, social economical and cultural contexts. For "My Lips Are Sealed" an exhibition opening at Franco Soffiantino Gallery on 22nd of September Anawana Haloba will be exhibiting one old work and two new works. The first project was exhibited at 16th Sidney Biennale 2008, by curator Carolyn Christov-Barkagiev (current Artistic Director of Documenta 13 in 2012), who had commissioned Haloba to produce a video and sound installation titled "When the Private Became Public". The project is based on a film made with five female participants from different cultural backgrounds, set against a harsh Australian desert landscape. The work explores the revolutionary turns that have resulted in women traversing the private realms and now entering into the public sphere traditionally not attributed to them – providing a contemporary perspective on pre-feminist ideologies. The two new works are "The Oracle" and "Say It As It Is". "The Oracle" is a performative/sculptural installation that is arranged as a consultancy space in a favela living space which explores the social economical politics of the developing world, at the same time offering to foretell and promise to resolve global social economical future by attending to individuals that consult it. The second new project "Say it as it is" is a performance piece in which the performers re-tell (re-write) the perceptions created by colonization, especially in the western world.