4
Makda Embaie
Marina Dubia
Shaon M
12.08.2023 – 30.09.2023
Documentation images: Jacky Jaan-Yuan Kuo
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For the fourth iteration of (be)longing, three new artist publications by Makda Embaie, Marina Dubia and Shaon M are presented at House of Foundation. These three artists where chosen through an open call earlier in the year, with the only condition that the works somehow addressed the title. A new selection of books featured in the reading room were sourced around and during the 2023 Bergen Art Book Fair.
Language, shame, and transformation are the ties that bind these artists together. And each has their own unique perspective, method, and mode of communicating and/or obscuring. Plurality and specificity are, in fact, not mutually exclusive but go hand in hand. Here there is room for all. You do not have to understand everything.
The artists in this exhibition were selected through a Scandinavian open call. The call received over 40 applications, thank you to all who applied and all the strong projects that unfortunately could not be included.
Breaking Bread and Language by Makda Embaie aims to carve out a space where people can practice their specific language constellations without it being aligned, compared or corrected into the idea of language that the nation state has. Both a guide and a testimony, the book and associated work are generous and intimate.
E Eu Com Isso? (What have I got to do with that?) by Marina Dubia is a work that demands the viewer to engage and look closely. The origin of the work is a fragile, intimate text once removed from an email almost a decade ago. Too important to delete forever, the text was uncovered, built upon and is the basis of the artist’s exploration of blackness through conversations and correspondence with family and friends.
Brown Babbel by Shaon M is a collection of short texts embedded in a chaotic and intricately detailed visual meditation on obscurity, abstraction, repetition and density. The work is not one that is searching for or portraying acceptance, but rather flaunts a specific, individual vision and way of being. The texts are both older and created especially for this occasion.
Makda Embaie
(b.1994) is a poet and artist based in Oslo who focuses on languages in relation to the nation-state and the individual. She holds an MA in Fine Art from Kunsthøyskolen i Oslo, education from Konstfack in Stockholm, Biskop Arnö's author school and at the Royal Institute of Art Post-Master course, Decolonizing Architecture. In her work she uses installation, sound, text, film and photography, shifting the focus from the nation-state's narrative towards specific experiences of language.
Marina Dubia
(b. 1992, Brazil) is an artist based in Copenhagen and São Paulo wandering at the frontiers between visual arts, dance and discourse. She works with flesh, bones, dust and institutions; with words and their effects on us. Her proposals seek to disrupt patterns of sociability, to promote inquisitive observation, and to untangle bodies and discourse. In 2021, she concluded her MFA at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In 2020, she was part of PACAP 4 – Advanced Programme for Creation in Performative Arts at Fórum Dança, Lisbon. Recently, her work has been exhibited at O-Overgaden in Cophengen.
Shaon M
(xe/xem) is a former-forever tropical 'child'/aspiring writer-collector-dilettante-artist-vagrant currently based in Oslo. Xe works primarily with words, and (lost and found) images-both moving and still, sometimes movement, also sound. In xer work Shaon is interested in interrogating narratives of power, desire, and (dis)possession, to imagine new worlds through collaborative (word)play.
A public conversation between the artists in conjunction with the exhibition opening and book launch took place on Saturday, August 12 from 13:10 at House of Foundation in Moss.
Image credit: Jelsen Lee Innocent
Breaking Bread and Language is an ongoing project about the nation state and its relationship to language by the artist and poet Makda Embaie. At House of Foundation, Makda held a workshop for people with a connection to the Tigringya language and diaspora experience, to translate texts together. The workshop, which took place on Saturday, September 30, was part of the MOMENTUM 12 Live programme.
Image credit: Jessica Williams
The publications and works in this exhibition were made thanks to the financial support of Viken Fylkeskommune, Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond, and Arts and Culture Norway: Project Support and the Pilot for the distribution and display of artists' books.
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