In this exhibition, Nnenna Onuoha presents three short videos that depict various forms of ritual and process, documenting how Black bodies move in and through spaces from the intimate to the public. The three videos direct our attention to daily rituals of (self-)care and sustenance, as well as how paying attention to and honouring one's body becomes woven into larger acts of intervention and the collective reclaiming of histories that center Black voices.

Nnenna Onuoha is a Ghanaian-Nigerian researcher and visual artist based in Berlin, Germany. Her research explores monumental silences surrounding the histories and afterlives of colonialism across West Africa, Europe and the United States, asking: How do we remember, which pasts do we choose to perform, and why? A second strand of her work focuses on archiving Black experience in the present to understand how, amidst all of this, we practice care and repair for each other. Her work has shown at the Galerie im Turm, the Kunstverein Hamburg, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art Shanghai, and the Johannesburg Art Gallery among others. Nnenna is currently a binational doctoral researcher in Media Anthropology at Harvard University and Global History at the University of Potsdam. She is also a 2023 Flaherty Film Seminar Fellow, and winner of the 2023 Amadeu Antonio Foundation Prize.

The list of ongoing wars and armed conflicts in Syria, Ukraine, Palestine and Israel, in Sudan or in the Congo, the Covid-19 pandemic, the steadily worsening crisis in the financial and labor sectors as well as the climate change that is taking place all the time in the background on an increasingly massive and rapid scale, while at the same time the demand for fossil fuels continues to rise, only appear to be the latest events and developments in a series that reaches far into the past. These events and developments are now increasingly revealing the structural crisis, if not catastrophic nature of this way of being in the world and treating it here in Europe, perhaps in the very heart of darkness - a realization that has been experienced in other parts of the world in the most terrible way on an every day level for over 500 years.

How can we continue to live in and with this way of treating the world that creates crises and disasters? Without denying that it is also a part of our being, our way of thinking and acting? Without succumbing to the temptation of escapism, closing our minds and trying not to think about it? Without taking refuge in naturalizing simplifications such as: That's just the way it is, eat or be eaten.

And how does this apply in particular to working and living with and in the art field? Because this is where we work and live, this is where we speak from - from a position that is also involved in all of this. What roles do art spaces and the actors working in these conditions play? What functions do they fulfill, what tasks do they have within them? And what about the ideas and phantasms of autonomy, freedom, creativity, criticism, resistance and romanticism that are substantially associated with art and artists? And what about discussions about all this – are they possible, are they sought for and do they continue? Or are they more about clear positioning, fixed opinions and exclusions?

In a way, the undertaking How to leave this world? follows on from the series Kunstraum in der Katastrophe (Art spaces in the catastrophe) from summer 2023. This time, however, we are more in search of concrete ways of exiting, of leaving, of abolishing this way of making the world and less interested in criticizing, reforming or improving it. We hope that this will lead to more concrete actions, other experiences and thus other perspectives - hopefully completely different perspectives.

How to leave this world? consists of an exhibition, perhaps more of a spatial situation, and a number of events and workshops taking place in it: the space of the Kunstverein will be filled with a video from Marwa Arsanio's series Who is afraid of Ideology?, Jakob Jakobsen's letter of resignation from being a professional artist and an audio piece about it, as well as an Abolish-Strike-Dream-Archive-Altar-Bar, which will also host three reading evenings (on Human Strike, Dreams and Fantasy as Critical Practice, and Communization and the Abolition of Gender), which in turn will end in bar evenings. At the opening there will be a discussion between Kathy-Ann Tan, Jakob Jakobsen, Birte Heier and Sebastian Stein on working and living conditions in the art world, leaving it and the background to Wie bloß diese Welt verlassen? Furthermore there will be an event on exits, strikes and canceling. At the beginning of May, we will spend two weeks attempting to abolish the Kunstverein with KVL. During this time, there will also be a participation by Mattin. And finally, we are organizing a talk with the activist group Letzte Generation.

In this workshop, we will deal with this subjective disintegration. We will take Pauline Oliveros' deep listening exercises as a starting point. In these exercises, Oliveros explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the conscious nature of listening while cultivating a greater awareness of the external and internal sound environment.

Through listening exercises, conversations, and other experimental devices and by reflecting on current noise theories, this workshop will explore the prevailing confusion that emerges from an increasingly complex and contingent reality and aim to address and register internal and external noise that bothers, disturbs, exhausts, or omits us.

We will explore the social noise between an increasingly competitive and individualistic reality and our inability to adjust to a crumbling model by listening to our confusion.

The workshop will be for free and every one is invited to participate. It is also possible to join for single days but it makes much more sense to be there the whole time. As we will not reply to email or phone during the Abolish KVL phase from the 29th April please register prior to the 28th via mail@kunstverein-langenhagen.de