S A V V Y Contemporary

For this, it seems appropriate to invoke, convoke or deploy the ‘cosmogenic powers’ of artists and artistic practice to guide us. On this journey SAVVY Contemporary engages in what Paget Henry would call the ‘poetic power of artistic practice’ to ‘un-name and re-name, to de-institute old selves and establish new ones, and to silence imposed voices and reclaim lost ones’ in an effort to resolve the ‘crisis of entrapment.’

SAVVY Contemporary has defined as one of its focal points the urge to deliberate, experiment and experienciate on issues of conviviality and hospitality. Taking into consideration the rise of xenophobic and racial violence, widening gaps in class and economic realities, revamped hegemonial structures over the last years and decades, the necessity to reflect about hospitality seems to be more important than ever. We actively and performatively try out strategies of ignoring, abrogating, neutralizing those distances and impediments between the self and the ego, the self and the other, or basically negating the existence of self and other, as categories of differentiation. A possible method of realising the aforementioned is a practice of radical conviviality and sharing.

SAVVY Contemporary is a space for epistemological diversity. A space that embodies and screams out Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ postulation that ‘Another Knowledge is Possible.’ By moving away from the ‘god-trick’, i.e. the all-seeing eye of Western science that considers itself the omniscient observer, Donna Haraway offers the image of the embodied, complicated, actively seeing eye, which is a split and contradictory observer. Her argumentations for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims resonate in our practice. At SAVVY Contemporary we appropriate proposals on viewing from a body – always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, against the view from above, from nowhere, or from simplicity – and we push this further to what we will call ‘Associated Situated Knowledges’ or just ‘Associated Knowledges.’ While viewing from these bodies, one also puts them in relation, association and companion with each other and their sociopolitical ecology. In so doing, one not only puts the bodies, but also their embodied knowledges, histories, memories in association. In this respect, art and exhibition-making act as catalysts.