Past exhibition at Lumiar Cité:

Sarat Maharaj

AAH Room

29.04. - 18.06.2017

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Sarat Maharaj is a well know art historian, curator and thinker based in London and Malmö. He is an authority on the oeuvre of Marcel Duchamp and James Joyce. Maharaj’s rather loosely defined project ‘AAH Room’ is based on his classroom back in the 1960s, when he studied Art History on Salisbury Island, Durban, in South Africa, at a university restricted by the apartheid regime to ‘Blacks of Indian origin’. The room developed at the time as a hybrid environment, privately exhibiting an ‘evolutionary ladder’ of artifacts, artworks and cultures undermining the insistence on a clear distinction applied by the apartheid government.

After the first presentation of the ‘AAH Room’ at the Malmö Art Academy in Sweden, a new version was developed for Lisbon, including works by the artists Pedro Barateiro, Harun Farocki, Ângela Ferreira, Renée Green, Emil Westman Hertz, Roger Palmer, Allan Sekula and Heimo Zobernig, together with documentary material of different origins. All objects ‘furnish’ Maharaj’s art history classroom in order to re-create the space metaphorically at Lumiar Cité, rendering the room from the past in a contemporary context.

Internalized Eurocentric systems of classification, of organizing objects in categories or segregated compartments, suggest parallel universes and the display embodies their apartness. The interest at the exhibition at Lumiar Cité is what kind of counter-views and readings the display also open up, perhaps quiet unwittingly. The hybrid nature of the AAH Room is also reflected in the fact that it is both an exhibition space and a seminar room, where Sarat Maharaj, Ângela Ferreira and Manuela Ribeiro Sanches, among others, will lecture and discuss, in a set-up which invites us to think about how to deal with the decolonialisation of knowledge in an all-compassing knowledge society – a pansophic world? What mileage can be got out of the idea of art practice not as hard-nosed knowledge production, but its opposite – as knowledge ignorance, as the ‘Ignorantitis Sapiens’ mode?