Abiona Esther Ojo & Huda Takriti. Weaving Truths, Untangling Fictions
In cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Applied Arts Vienna
Each in her own way, the award-winning artists, Abiona Esther Ojo (graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) and Huda Takriti (graduate of the University of Applied Arts Vienna) probe questions concerning their positions in diverse cultural and historical as well as personal-biographical contexts.
By weaving together documentary and narrative elements, confronting the past with the present, dismantling barriers of space and time, and reflecting on the social potentials of distinctive moments in community life, they craft narratives that intertwine the real with the fictional while also insistently untangling the strands of the latter.
“Abiona Esther Ojo’s profound installation Die Magie steckt in jeder Strähne (There’s Magic in Every Strand) unfolds the social and political implications of Black hair through the lens of cultural history, but in from a very personal perspective. Combining sculptural, analog-reproductive, and digital media, she deftly connects the practice of creating Afro hairstyles, which is bound up with knowledge, collective memories, rituals, and intimate processes, to general questions of identity and representation—from the message as a signal of protest to a well-established code of community membership”, so the Kunsthalle Wien Prize jury’s reasoning.
Abiona Esther Ojo & Huda Takriti. Weaving Truths, Untangling Fictions
10 Dec 2020 - 28 Mar 2021