Black Land, Red Land Festival Preview

by Aurola Győrfy // Dec. 8, 2023

The ‘Black Land, Red Land—Restitute’ festival, under the artistic direction and curation of Elena Sinanina, announces its interdisciplinary exploration from December 21st to 28th, 2023. The festival serves as a critical examination of entrenched operational mechanisms and knowledge paradigms within museums and institutions. With a focus on artifacts and narratives from the Egyptian Museums in Berlin and in Turin, Italy, the festival aims to redefine the audience’s interaction with and understanding of these historical holdings. Over four days, the festival’s methodologies will be showcased in exhibitions and performances and discussed in talks at venues such as silent green, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Palais am Festungsgraben and various public spaces.

Yara Mekawei: ‘Nefertiti,’ 2022, Black Land, Red Land // Photo by Lutz Knospe

The event presents an unparalleled opportunity to engage in a reevaluation of historical narratives and the role of museums in preserving and presenting cultural heritage. Attendees will be invited to explore, question and reassess the significance of these artifacts within our global cultural landscape. The festival explores diverse themes of cultural preservation, including non-Western mythologies and appropriated cultural entities. The events, performances and exhibitions raise questions, such as: Who decides on the return of artifacts? What are the criteria? Where, precisely, do the restitutions go? What reasons are given? Who is now—and was then—excluded from the conversation? The discursive section of the festival will focus on different patterns of argumentation in museum institutions, both from a critical/historical and a practical perspective.

In addition to the theme of restitution, some artistic contributions to the festival will revolve around the ‘Dedication to Sakhmet,’ a part of the program in which a statue of the Egyptian goddess Sakhmet forms the basis of the performances and activations. Since their export from Egypt in the 19th century, statues of Sakhmet have been scattered across various museums worldwide, with a lack of cultural context. Sound artist Yara Mekawei will offer two new compositions and performative works related to the ‘Dedication to Sakhmet’ at silent green Kulturquartier, which she created as part of her research and preparation for the project, as well as her first performance with the sound object ‘Divine Sound Prism,’ which is based on the artist’s own design.

Statue of Sakhmet, 2023 // Photo by Lutz Knospe

On December 21st, visitors can join the new performance ‘Earth’ (2023), by singer and artist Hani Mojtahedy at Kunstquartier Bethanien. The installation is part of her project ‘Hjirok,’ which evokes the Kurdish landscape as a place of freedom and disappearance. The series of works, named after the spirit of water, brings together memories of the refugee areas of Iranian Kurdistan and recognizes them as places threatened with destruction due to political struggles and climate change.

The davul is a drum found in the Balkans, the Middle East and Anatolian countries, where it is traditionally used in festivals, announcements, military bands, rituals and other contexts. Recontextualizing the meaning of this instrument, artist and musician Cevdet Erek explores the multiple connections between space and sound at Kunstquartier Bethanien. On December 22nd, his davul performance will continue his long-running series of artistic adaptations and explorations of this drum instrument following appearances at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berghain, Maxim Gorki Theater and other venues, and the album ‘Davul’ (2017), released through Berlin’s Subtext Recordings.

Attila Csihar, Neues Museum, Black Land 2022 // Photo by Lutz Knospe

Following Cevdet Erek’s performance, singer and musician Attila Csihar will present a new performative work dedicated to Sakhmet, as well, exploring the borderlands of transcendence through the binary of the utterable and the representable.

Since 2015, artist, writer and actress Lea Draeger has been working on the series ‘Ökonomische Päpst’ [Economic Popes], which looks at patriarchal power relations and binary structures. The series of more than 8000 stamp-sized portraits feature a wide range of popes of varying gender and identity. After her contribution to ‘BLACK LAND 2022,’ the series was expanded with a number of ‘Ägyptische Päpst,’ as well. Four of these drawings will be shown during the festival, and on December 27th, Draeger will team up with Mekawei for a performance that engages various names, aspects and backgrounds of Sakhmet.

On December 28th, the festival’s closing event at Kunstquartier Bethanien will be an invitation ceremony for the collective flow of imagination by the artist and researcher houaïda. In ‘MEDITERRANÏA,’ pluralistic and aquatic worlds will emerge into the space of beings, gods and spectators.

Throughout the four days, the festival’s discursive program critically dissects museums’ argumentative patterns, offering more practice-based perspectives. The ‘Black Land, Red Land–Restitute’ festival promises to be an essential event that will challenge traditional notions of heritage and showcase the need for collective restitution in a global context.