We are happy to commence the autumn season with the exhibition Conversations with Stitched-up Lips by Anawana Haloba, presenting a new site-specific sound installation.

In this exhibition, the audience is invited to listen to fragments of text, noise and tones with reference to trauma, healing and psychoanalysis via a number of sculptural audio stations. No one is capable of speaking without a mouth – and stitched-up lips suggest silence. Silence as a result of a lack of willingness to listen, or of a prohibition to speak. A conversation that defies violent muting gives association to resistance, unity and hope.

'A mouth that yearns to speak of the load of its body shall flow
Pain and joy shall be objects in its river they shall expose the filthy and different truths
There will be no poetry you and me will sit and talk'

Anawana Haloba's work explores explores communities' contingency within historical, cultural and architectural contexts. She is currently a Phd Fellow through the Artistic Research Fellowship Programme (PKU) at the Department of Fine Art, University of Bergen. Her research explores womens' roles in independence movements and decolonialisation in Africa and the Caribbean. The exhibition Conversations with Stitched-up Lips constitutes a component in Haloba’s research.

The installation consists of material collected on research trips conducted in 2017-2018 to Zambia and the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) among other places. These locations are pertinent to the philosophy of Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) writing about liberation and identity.