ULTRASANITY: On Madness, Sanitation, Antipsychiatry and Resistance
A research, performance and exhibition project in multiple chapters

SAVVY Contemporary has opened the new instalment of its four-chaptered project ULTRASANITY, led by artistic director and curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (Faculty Berlin ’19) with curator Elena Agudio (Faculty Berlin ’17) .

On view until 26th January 2020 [extended to February 2!],  “…ULTRASANITY is not meant to be a romanticization of madness or mental illness, but an effort to reconsider and challenge the notion of madness and the stigmas labelled on the so-called mad. The aim of the project is to move beyond insanity as the opposite of sanity, and imagine a space beyond what is understood as sane, i.e. ultrasanity.”

ULTRASANITY, a project in four chapters, situates itself within the long term research project at SAVVY Contemporary with the title THE INVENTION OF SCIENCE that investigates science’s entanglements with the colonial enterprise and the capitalist project. ULTRASANITY challenges conventional methods and perspectives on mental health and questions medical (mis)conceptions of psychopathologies by reconsidering them in the context of coloniality, racialisation, objectification, and patriarchal oppression. Deeply entangled with our previous reflections on land struggles and toxicity, with this project we engage again with traumas and fears of displacement and contamination, this time offering an opportunity to ponder the notion of madness beyond a Western understanding, but also that space of madness as a possibility of resistance, of resilience, and of deliverance.

…We will concern ourselves with a possibility of liberating madness from the stigmas that have come to connote it, without romanticization.

INFORMATION
EXHIBITION 15.12.2019 – 02.02.2020 (extended)
Thurs–Sun  14:00 – 19:00
ADDRESS Plantagenstraße 31, 13347 Berlin

WITH John Akomfrah, Ulf Aminde, Leo Asemota, Yassine Balbzioui, M’Barek Bouhchichi, Virginia Chihota, Larisa Crunțeanu, Alessandra Eramo, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Frederick W. Hickling, Lukas Hofmann, Immy Mali, Teresa Margolles, Nathalie Mazeas, Lavar Munroe, Adjani Okpu-Egbe, and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

SAVVY TOURS IN SAVVY TONGUES
10.01.2019  17:00  in English with Kelly Krugman
21.01.2019  17:00  in Romanian with Jasmina Al-Qaisi
23.01.2019  17:00  in English with Kelly Krugman

PEOPLE
CURATORS  Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Elena Agudio
IN COLLABORATION WITH  Kelly Krugman
PROJECT TEAM  Abhishek Nilamber, Jörg-Peter Schulze, Lili Somogyi
MANAGMENT  Lema Sikod, Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock
COMMUNICATIONS  Anna Jäger
GRAPHIC DESIGN  Elsa Westreicher

ULTRASANITY is a continuation of our longterm investigation THE INVENTION OF SCIENCE. It is a collaboration of SAVVY Contemporary with ifa Gallery Berlin, Association of Neuroesthetics (AoN Berlin), Picha Art Lubumbashi and the Gnaoua Festival in Essaouira. The project is funded by the TURN Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes), the Foundation of Arts Initiative, and Association of Neuroesthetics (AoN Berlin).