The project Choreographies of Unsettlement examines frictions between spaces and times. The exhibition, accompanied by the publication, addresses time as an in-between space as well as temporalities of distances and proximities.
One of the starting points for the development of this project was Madina Tlostanova's concept of unsettlement, which she describes in her book “Narratives of Unsettlement: Being out-of-joint as a generative human condition”, published in 2023. She defines unsettlement as “a condition characterized by a constant negotiation between belonging and not belonging, rootedness and displacement, a chronophobic fear of change”.
Four artists focus on temporalities that elude them: in the cyclic movement of the sun (Aischa Gianna Müller), in the memory traces of the Sahara plants (Abdessamad El Montassir), in buried relics of riverbeds in the Kunlun Mountains (Yujia Liu), and in vanished mountains of limestone in Tatarstan (Gulshat Gubaidullina).
These chronotopes, full of their own historical prejudices, unfold different stories and choreographies of the unsettlement of time and space. The project addresses not only the retrieval of landscapes and of collective memory, but also how these landscapes survive by embedding the various narratives surrounding them.
The project is funded by the Cultural Office of the City of Leipzig and is being carried out as a final project of the Master's program Cultures of the Curatorial at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig.
