Group exhibition of Aykan Safoğlu, Rehema Chachage, Serena Lee 

Exhibition Period: October 11th – November 16th, 2024
Opening: October 10th, 2024, 6pm

Location: VBKÖ (Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs)
Maysedergasse 2/28 (4. Stock, Lift)
1010 Wien

Flickering, Lingering, Exiting is a coalescing of artworks by Aykan Safoğlu, Rehema Chachage, Serena Lee that share a desire to reimagine modes of belonging, perceiving, and producing knowledge. Three different approaches to artistic research intersect in this exhibition, engaging with practices that precede and exceed modernity/coloniality. Stories of gathering and dispersing are retold through an intermingling of paper, soot, weaved wild date palm, earth, photos, videos, sound, shredders, sneakers, bamboo, stringed resonance, martial movement – a testament to speaking and listening beside each other. 

Aykan Safoğlu’s work mobilizes print, moving images, and performative intervention to imagine, cultivate, and reflect companionship, familial lineage and belonging. Upon migrating from Turkey to Germany in 2008, Aykan has been in pursuit of migrant images, stretching photographic moments to critique power and cherish contact via togetherness. His research often leans on affect theory and contemporary BIPOC scholarly work in an attempt to break the visual codes of supremacy regimes, and resist their extractivist dualities. Hence, his photographic sculptures, essay films, and interventions bring photography in motion to measure what is neglected in societal historiographies. His hybrid forms migrate from his own biography to various idiosyncratic media in order to overcome the collective feelings of debt, hurt, and exhaustion.

Rehema Chachage works with/through multimedia/multisensory installation, image, sound, and text. Rooted in divergent and decolonial perspectives, her research-based, process-oriented, and community-centered practice focuses on alternative and non-canonized knowledge, with an emphasis on community- centered and generated knowledge forms;  on togetherness and community building as a means of survival; on forms of subversion and refusal that emerge from the mundane and every day; and on the idea of continuity through citation, naming, and renaming, arguing citation as a means for repair, re-membering, and more importantly, refusing erasure.  

Serena Lee‘s works with the Chinese internal martial art of taijiquan to reimagine ways of perceiving, relating, and thinking. Taijiquan is full of contradictions — healing and defending, advancing and receiving — oppositions that neither negate nor demand resolution but generates change. In conversation with family, and friends who reflect the plurality of Chinese diaspora, Serena traces the political and ethical potentialities of “oppositional continuity” as a form of resistance that finds strength in yielding. Serena relates martial arts with other embodied aesthetic practices – painting and music – to engage in knowledge production as ‘making sense’.

We invite audiences to join the artists in conversation and to engage with their research.

• November 8th: Guided tour with Aykan Safoğlu and Serena Lee
• November 16th: Closing event: Conversation with Rehema Chachage and Serena Lee