"The North-Eastern APO" (2023)
Installation: drawings, multi-channel sound. Production: Tonia Murray, Counterspace
Imagined by a Pan-African collective of architects and sound artists, the African Post Office (APO) is a project that develops as the infrastructural mechanism of a postal network and as a spatial intervention of the post as a pole. The post as an architectural intervention is the definition of a single point, it is used to mark out an important place, and from it, music and other performative rituals are gathered.
Referred to as The APO for short, the intercontinental office has recently expanded to include a new line of outposts across the Black Sea–Mediterranean Flyway, a trajectory marked by migratory birds moving between Eastern Europe to Sub-Saharan Africa. This new route occupies places of prior passage, a former post-office building, and sorting houses, weaving together a cross-cultural communication between the wind and weather through Ljubljana, Kaunas, and Riga. In these locations, the APO puts together a sonic score, a series of letters, and schematic drawings to help establish this North-Eastern expansion and to bridge laterally a different type of flight and connection. The founding members set up the APO to first send Sufi songs from Tripoli to Jo’Burg, a spiritual set of postal signals that needed a cross-continental infrastructure that found its route via the Indian Ocean.
The artists' work can also be seen in the sister-exhibition Long-distance Friendships at the 14th Kaunas Biennial.
Sumayya Vally is founder and principal of Counterspace - an award-winning design, research and pedagogical practice searching for expression for hybrid identities and territory, particularly for African and Islamic conditions - both rooted and diasporic. A World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and TIME100 Next list honoree, Vally has been identified as someone who will shape the future of architectural practice and canon. She serves on several boards, including the World Monuments Fund; through her interest in dynamic forms of archive, embodied heritage, and supporting new networks of knowledge in the arts. Vally designed the 20th Serpentine Pavilion in London, making her the youngest architect to receive the commission, which opened to critical acclaim as being one of the most radical pavilion designs to shape the commission. She was the Artistic Director of the inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah. Through this role, Vally has been praised for putting forth an entirely new and decolonial definition of islamic art, one that is resonant with the lived and embodied practices and experiences of the Islamic world. Practicing adjacent to the academy, Vally has received numerous awards and institutional honours for her contributions to the field, including an Honorary Professorship from UCL, and a gold medal from the RAIC.
Moad Musbahi works on the move, and on things that move, through collaborative installation-works, exhibition-making and writing. Currently he co-directs with the Harun Farocki Institut, the ‘Taught to Travel’ roaming programme in collaboration with RAW Material Company between Dakar and Alexandria, and initiated with Alma Chaouachi and Sara Bouzgarrou, he co-produces the Tunis-based ‘The Poem Fell Off Her Horse’, sound platform. Recent work has been presented at the Kunstverein, Hamburg, (2023); the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice, (2023); the 7th Singapore Biennale, Singapore (2022); and he is currently teaching and completing doctoral research in anthropology at Princeton University.
Thania Petersen is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses photography, performance and installation to address the intricacies and complexities of her identity in contemporary South Africa. Petersen’s reference points sit largely in Islam and in creating awareness about its religious, cultural and traditional practices. Threads in her work include the history of colonialist imperialism in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, as well as the social and cultural impact of westernised consumer culture. Her work is also informed by her Cape Malay heritage, and the practice of Sufi Islamic religious ceremonies. Petersen is represented in various public and private collections including World Cultures Museum Rotterdam (Netherlands), Smithsonian Museum (Washington DC), Oscar Niemeyer Museum Curitiba (Brazil), The Durban Art Gallery, The IZIKO South African National Gallery, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA), The Kilbourn Collection, The Jochen Zeitz Collection (South Africa), and The Yeojoo City Collection (South Korea).
Sukanta Majumdar (born 1977) is an award-winning sound designer of films and theatre, based in Kolkata, India. He studied audiography at SRFTI, Kolkata, and has worked with many renowned directors, including Siddiq Barmak of Afghanistan (Opium War, 2008). Sukanta also teaches and writes on sound.
/ Photo credit: Kristīne Madjare / Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art