Summer Lights Transitions II

Maya artist José Chi Dzul will contribute to the exhibition U JUUM XUNÁAN KAAB the humming of the guardian bee with a mural titled Conexión, that he is realizing on site. It is the outcome of a collaboration with poet Maria Elisa Chavarrea, who in her poem U juum Báalam Kaab, speaks about Melipona-culture in its connection to Maya language, and how their risk of extinction is intimately interconnected. In his painting, José Chi Dzul translates the imagery of words and sounds – playing also with the onomatopoeic elements of Maya language – into colors and geometric forms, using, as he says, “the most intimate part of nature” to visualize the complexity of the web of life we inhabit.

After a five day workshop in Berlin engaging a group of participants into the context, history, spirituality and technique of the Warli writing tradition, Mayur and Tushar Vayeda have also been working on a new piece as a contribution to the exhibition XOKK‘IIN perceiving temporalities. Therein they share their knowledge and experiences on reading signals in nature that are also part of the Warli tradition. On a movable floor-piece, they will narrate stories of rain predictions, such as the Kua birds singing (a type of bird that only appears before the monsoon), the positions of birds nests on trees, the migration of ants, the change of colors of frogs, all through a dialogue with Warli Shaman Shantaram Gurkhanal and farmer Suresh Burge, preservers of these knowledges in the community.

Bash Boibhob (Bamboo Stories) is a 96 mins documentary film written and directed by German/Bangladeshi filmmaker Shaheen Dill-Riaz. It follows the journey of a 70-metre raft made from bamboo stems (the cargo is the raft itself) as it makes a 300km journey from the forests of Sylhet, in North-Eastern Bangladesh, down the river Kushiyara. As the film follows the progress of the raft, the viewer learns the story behind the bamboo, from its felling the in forest to its being bundled and floated to the river via a series of man-made channels. Quietly the film opens a window into the lives of the people involved, telling their stories and those of their families through interviews and captured dialogue, thereby opening up a very personal experience of the river and its relation to human kind.   

Samari Chakma and  Naeem Mohaiemen’s work and Bor-Porong (Autobiography of the Drowned) is an oral history of the Chakma Adivasi (indigenous) people from Bangladesh, performed as an online dialogue between Samari Chakma, in Sydney, Australia, and Naeem Mohaiemen, in Dhaka. The work raises questions about how the modern borders of formerly colonized nations have recreated patterns of oppression that entrapped Indigenous and minority groups, resulting in dispossession, persecution, and displacement from ancestral homelands. Capturing the story of Samari Chakma’s mother specifically, the performance speaks to the struggles of those who lost their land after the government dammed the Karnaphuli River at Kaptai in the early 1960s, flooding villages and farms.