Sex Ecologies: Public Program

We are proud to invite you to a number of exciting events during the opening weekend of Sex Ecologies!

The exhibition's public program is curated by RAW Material Company, a center for art, knowledge and society that promotes artistic and intellectual creativity in Africa. The program is free and open to everyone. Please note that parts of the program take place online.

We follow the Governments guidelines for infection control.
Welcome to a safe art experience!

Thursday, 9 December

6–9 pm Exhibition opening

7 pm Performance by artist, choreographer, and dancer Okwui Okpokwasili
The Sex Ecologies public program will open in movement through Okpokwasili’s multidisciplinary performance responding to the themes of the exhibition.

Friday, 10 December

3–4.30 pm Screening of Causality Dilemmas (2014) by curator and artist Gabi Ngcobo, followed by a conversation
Addressing freedom of expression, sexuality, and homophobia, this film offers a spiritual map of human feelings and desires in Africa with Senegal as its focal point.

5.30–7 pm Musical performance by artist, researcher, and community organizer Soñ Gweha aka Nyum Supernova
Soñ Gweha explores intimacy, trauma, and resilience of Black womxn and interrogates mythologies in relation to queer eroticism.

Saturday, 11 December

2–3.30 pm Curatorial panel on Sex Ecologies with the teams of Kunsthall Trondheim, The Seed Box, RAW Material Company, and exhibiting artists Anne Duk Hee Jordan and Jessie Kleemann
The curatorial team of Sex Ecologies and the participating artists will discuss the themes and artworks in the show and public program, as well as the process behind the project. Watch at the Kunsthall or register for webinar here.

4–6 pm Reading and Panel

4 pm Reading of an excerpt from Can Planting Trees Tell an Alternative Art History? by curator and writer Serubiri Moses
Serubiri Moses asks how alternative art histories could be written so that the struggles of Black women and people from the LGBTQ+ community can be brought back into the center.
4.30pm Panel: Plants as reproducers of stories
In this panel, curator Natasha Ginwala and artists Uriel Orlow and Otobong Nkanga explore plants in the context of colonizations, globalization, and consumer society. Watch at reading and the Panel the Kunsthall or register for webinar here.

7–8pm Sound session with Elin Már Øyen Vister

8–10 pm DJ set by DJ IDA VIE
With a great love for vinyl, DJ IDA VIE'S record bag is filled with house, jazz, space disco, world & afrobeats. She is the general manager at the bar Tyven in Trondheim.

Sunday, 12 December

10.30 am–12 pm Panel: Shell(ter)
From pearl-popping cafés in Hong Kong and West African markets, by way of a cooperative of Somali fishermen and the hot sands of Venice Beach, in this discussion with collectives Zheng Mahler and Cooking Sections we follow the lives of seashells and their fleshy interiors as sites that materialize and act on questions of identity, sexuality, power, contamination, and value. Watch at the Kunsthall or register for webinar here.

1–1.30 pm Reading by writer Yemisi Aribisala
Writer Yemisi Aribisala traces the personal and cultural through sensual journeys from the kitchen to the dining table, exploring how power, sex, and gender are exercised—and challenged—in the domestic sphere.

1.30–1.45 pm Screening: In the Shadow of Our Ghosts (2018) by artists Ayesha Hameed and Hamedine Kane
On 29 April 2006, a twenty-foot boat was spotted off the southeastern coast of Barbados. On board, eleven bodies were found by coast guards, preserved and sun-dried. The ghost ship had been drifting for four months on the Atlantic. This video is an inadequate narrative of the story of these migrants, trying to sense of the complicity of the weather, ocean currents, and state violence in the voyage of this ship.

1.45–3 pm Panel: Water incarnate
This panel with gender and environmental studies scholar and co-director at the Seed Box Astrida Neimanis and artist and scholar Ayesha Hameed takes West African hydro feminisms as a frame to explore water histories and challenge the frontier that has been constructed between human life and water as life. Watch at the Kunsthall or register for webinar here.

RAW Material Company on the Sex Ecologies Program:
This program is a convocation of friends from RAW’s expanded, global ecosystem, with whom we will explore possibilities for a renewal of the psychic and physical bonds between human, stone, sand, grass, water, and more.

From our perspective in Dakar, Senegal, on the west coast of Africa, we see this program as an opportunity to push back against colonial and industrial ruptures that have positioned nature as a disposable resource. Folded into this position is the toxicity of racism, patriarchy, and homophobia, out of which forms a metastasizing pillaging and violation of the bodies and minds of all beings. The African continent, our home, has for centuries been a site of such assaults, but also a space where non-Cartesian world views have persisted and survived. In this brackish water, there is much to draw on.

We turn to the space of vitality and erotic found in artworks for reprieve and to imagine, along with the Sex Ecologies exhibition, how we can better understand and reclaim our symbiosis with the more than human world. In this program, we maintain a particular focus on methodologies and practices that move beyond and against Eurocentrism, that ground themselves and swim in the realities of the mangrove, a pink lake, or tables of dried molluscs. Panel discussions, screenings, and performances come together to reverberate across multiple planes of experience.

Sex Ecologies is founded in a collaboration between Kunsthall Trondheim and The Seed Box – an environmental humanities collaboratory. Made possible through generous support from The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (Mistra) and the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (Formas) through The Seed Box program.

Other collaborators: