exercises in becoming uncertain

How to articulate the urgency to remain attentive to the material reality of shared, disturbed environments? exercises in becoming uncertain enters as an array of processes activated by encounters in fractured spaces, disrupted ecologies, disjointed chronologies, lifeworlds destructed. It is driven forth by a need to respond to such experiences, an attempt at least. To respond is to be made accountable: to the web of connectivities and reciprocities, to the ethical load, to the undercurrents whirling beneath each move. Yet how to respond meaningfully? Thoughts weighing on.

Losing one’s bearings and finding them, if at all, further downstream perforates the journey. Encounters become dialogue become friendship become loss become solitude become companionship become scream. Geographies are messy, inconsequential, their borders fuzzy, fields never fully inked in. Let it be that way.

Thinking through a diffracting lens of doubt I try to reimagine energy as an ethics of forces. Forces imparted on material bodies, ever-vulnerable. One inhabits the fringe terrain of knowing-not, ‘artistic research’ dwelling in cleavages and contradictions, always-already irresolved. One begins navigating such terrain. Clouded, hesitant, tumbling; an active subject-in-doubt situated whilst moving, affecting and being affected. Doubt could grow into the motor to undermine ideological certainties, she thinks for now. And into a mirror through which to see our complicity within the systems and conditions producing all sorts of inequities. Pensive time, durational thickness, wonder and failure are moulded into tools to sensitize the present and the act of being present.

The ecologies of knowledge with which exercises in becoming uncertain seeks synergies are unruly, but include (un)forms of holding on in conditions of adversity; literature and poetry in the wake of man-induced disasters; more-than-farming on radioactive land; wavelengths, blast waves and other swells; crafting and recrafting the shattered; tuning voice and currents to aberrant frequencies; blue or green, perhaps alike. Images don’t seem to conclude.

Marianna Christofides is an artist, filmmaker and researcher living and working in Berlin. In 2011 she represented Cyprus at the 54th Venice Biennale. She has been awarded numerous grants and scholarships, among others by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (IfA); i-Portunus; Akademie der Künste der Welt; Outset Greece; Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst; Stiftung Kunstfonds; Kölnischer Kunstverein; Onassis Foundation. In 2019 Christofides was finalist for the Berlin Art Prize. She participated in residency programs at Goethe-Institut Villa Kamogawa, Kyoto; Tabakalera – International Centre for Contemporary Culture, San Sebastián; Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck; ENSA Bourges; Light Cone, Paris; Iaspis, Stockholm; Villa Aurora, Los Angeles; Gasworks, London. Exhibitions, screenings, collaborations, publications and talks in 2020 include Ravensbrück Women’s Concentration Camp; VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research; in 2019 Berlin Art Prize, Display, Berlin (s); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest (s); tanzhaus nrw, Düsseldorf (coll. with A. Waierstall); Videonale.17, Bonn; Schwarz Foundation, Athens Conservatoire; in 2018 Goethe-Institut Kyoto; Kunstpavillon – Tiroler Künstlerschaft, Innsbruck; Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen; in 2017 Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka; GAK, Bremen; Temporary Gallery, Cologne (s); Batroun Mediterranean Film Festival; in 2016 Akademie der Künste, Berlin; in 2015 Museo Riso, Palermo; 5th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art; Museum of Yugoslav History, Belgrade; in 2014 National Museum of Visual Arts, Sofia; in 2013 Museum für Photographie, Braunschweig; in 2012 Kunsthalle Bremen; BOZAR, Brussels.