Project: Kanga for the Present
Artist: Ada M. Patterson
Residency: September - October 2021
Art History School: 23 September 2021
Workshop kanga making: 16 October 2021
Finissage: 6 November 2021
For their stay at HMK, Ada M. Patterson will think about kanga, a carefully sewn Kenyan textile, infused with stories, traditionally given as gifts. Patterson will design a new collection of kanga on the subject of the ongoing experience of crisis - climatic, heteropatriarchal and capitalist.
Background
For their residency at HMK, Ada M. Patterson is making kanga, textiles infused with stories and given as gifts. Patterson is developing a new collection of kanga about an ongoing lived experience of crisis and grief between changing bodies and changing worlds.
Kanga making
I started making kanga during Hurricane Dorian (2019). My mother gave me this practice. Each kanga has a name—a name which prays, prophesies, hopes, wishes, blesses, laughs, mocks, criticises, warns, teaches, imagines, protects, curses—and you gift a kanga to a person for whom its name is meaningful. That is to say, you gift a kanga and its message usually with someone in mind. I started making kanga as a means to find what little words I could muster for what was happening across the Caribbean—what is still happening, what will continue to happen—in our climate-queered world, in our world queered by crisis.
A gift of support
Through the project, Patterson will explore how kanga, as a performative and visual intersection between image-making, textiles, clothing, poetry and communication, can make room to support the voices of those who struggle to speak in times that are difficult to speak to. How might one find shelter in the knowing gift of a kanga? This project treats our thoughts, words and experiences as gifts we give to the world out of love, whether our love is soft, tough or just complicated.
Visitors to HMK will encounter an unstable presentation of ongoing shifts where a constellation of kanga keeps changing across the duration of Patterson’s residency, offering new, fragmented and disrupted choreographies of image, text and meaning. Further, Patterson will also be imagining a new performance guided by kanga, speaking to the grief and joy of changing bodies and worlds.
Ada M. Patterson, The Whole World is Turning, digital video, 2019
Finissage: Kanga for the Present
6 November 2021
While artist Ada M. Patterson’s presentation-in-progress Kanga for the Present is reaching its final configuration with newly developed kanga, we come together for the last time at HMK to witness, think and reflect about and beyond the story they tell: one of joy and grief between changing bodies and changing worlds.
We start the afternoon with a conversation by dr. Eliza Steinbock, Associate Professor of Gender and Diversity Studies at Maastricht University, with Ada and the audience, followed by time to visit the exhibition and see Ada’s film The Whole World is Turning in the cinema.
16.30: doors open
17.00: introduction
17.15: conversation with Eliza Steinbock and Ada M. Patterson
18.00: time to visit the exhibition, see the movie The Whole World is Turning and have a drink and snack.
20.00: doors closing
In the cinema: The Whole World is Turning
A group of friends and lovers is visited by a familiar guest. They remark on how this guest has turned, how they have turned and how the whole world is turning. How will they receive this turn of events?
The Whole World Is Turning is a queer retelling of hurricanes. Patterson imagined this work in the Fall of 2019, during the material and emotional turmoil left after Hurricane Dorian hit the Caribbean and devastated The Bahamas. The Caribbean region is one of the frontlines of climate crisis. Seasonal destruction by hurricanes has always been part of the social fabric of life and death in the region. Yet the hurricane season, and the destruction it brings, continues to be warped and intensified by rising sea levels and temperatures.
How does one relate to the planet that forms our lifeworld becoming more turbulent and precarious? Rather than casting the hurricane as a malignant force of nature to blame, or a spirit of revenge to curse, Patterson casts it as a regular visitor and familiar guest. Unable to explain herself, and unable to see through her swollen eye, she appears changing and confused. What if we see her not as the prime agent of havoc and hurt, but view her erratic behaviour and our erratic experience as symptoms of our world being caught in the crosshairs of climate imperialism?
Eliza Steinbock is Associate Professor of Gender and Diversity Studies at Maastricht University. They are author of the award-winning book Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (Duke, 2019), and co-editor of Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis: Aesthetic Resilience (Routledge, 2020). Currently, Eliza is project leader of “The Critical Visitor” consortium, developing intersectional approaches for inclusive heritage (NWO 2020-2025). Together with Susan Stryker and Jian Neo Chen, Eliza co-edits the new Duke book series for critical trans studies, ASTERISK.
Art History School: Kanga for the Present
23 September 2021
An interactive talk with Maartje Fliervoet and Ada M. Patterson, as part of the project Kanga for the Present.
For this edition of Art History School, artist Maartje Fliervoet engages in conversation with artist in residence Ada M. Patterson and the audience, to talk with and about the series of kanga that has been installed in the exhibition space as part of Patterson’s project Kanga for the Present. Kanga is a textile popular in East Africa, infused with messages and given as gifts. Patterson makes kanga to speak to an ongoing lived experience of crisis and grief between changing bodies and changing worlds. During this Art History School visitors are invited to partake in an informal exchange of thought about Kanga for the Present and the experiences being discussed.
This Art History School is a collaboration between Hotel Maria Kapel and Manifold Books, founded in 2015 by Fliervoet. Patterson will work on a project for Manifold Books in 2021.
Maartje Fliervoet is a visual artist who lives and works in Amsterdam. For her, perception is a continuous process of raising questions, especially images and associations that create a sense of indefinability. An important aspect in her work is the notion of ‘not knowing’ at the expense of common perspectives in western thinking.. In 2015 she founded Manifold Books (www.manifoldbooks.nl), a project space that explores the relationships between books and exhibitions.
Workshop kanga making
16 October 2021
Do you have something to say to this world and the times we live in? Spend the day saying it with pictures, poetry and textiles in this Kanga Zine-Making workshop. Kanga is a wearable printed textile popular in East Africa, featuring a border, a central image and a proverb. We will be making small kanga designs on paper which will be made into a collective zine.
By playing with Kanga – a sophisticated form of communication, wish-making and celebration – this workshop believes in treating our thoughts, words and experiences as gifts we give to the world out of love, whether our love is soft, tough or just complicated.
All skill levels are welcome.
A small range of materials will be provided (including a glue-gun) but, if you have any preferred materials (paints, pencil crayons, graphite, felt-tip markers, charcoal, fabric, magazine cut-outs, sequins, glitter, plastic waste, plant matter, etc.), you are invited to bring these with you.
Bio: Ada M. Patterson
Ada M. Patterson (Bridgetown, 1994) is a visual artist, writer and educator based between Barbados, London and Rotterdam. She works with masquerade, textiles, performance, video and poetry, telling new stories or rethinking old stories in new recuperative ways. Trying to account for the complexities of bodies otherwise unaccounted for, bodies queered by crisis, bodies named invisible, dispensable or ungrievable, bodies confronted with the very real material conditions of a world not built for their survival, their ongoing work hopes to imagine elegies for bodies and moments always already out of time.
Patterson is the 2020 NLS Kingston Curatorial & Art Writing Fellow. They have exhibited with LADA, London; Barbados Museum & Historical Society, Bridgetown; TENT, Rotterdam; Ateliers ’89, Oranjestad; Alice Yard, Port-of-Spain. Her writing has featured in ARC Magazine, Sugarcane Magazine, PREE, Mister Motley and Metropolis M.