Quiet Storm Blowin’

Opening: Thu, 05/10/2023
Duration: 06/10/2023 – 02/12/2023
Artist: Soñ Gweha
Curator: Frederike Sperling

I believe that we need to demand temporalities and spaces in which to live off pleasure and joy, to emancipate our bodies, to do up our ideas in drag, and to thank the fruits of the future as an act of reparative and ecological justice. – Soñ Gweha[1]

A power source of tender force generatin', radiatin' - Turn me on, turn them on [...] Butterfly caught up in a hurricane, hurricane - Lucky me, I'm better free . – Smokey Robinson[2]

The regeneration of the Earth is inextricably linked to the healing of the racialized body: at least since the beginning of colonialism, the plundering and destruction of nature has gone hand in hand with the exploitation and oppression of disenfranchised people. Recognizing this connection – as activist and philosopher Angela Y. Davis puts it, this “calamitous intersection of racial capitalism and systemic assaults on the environment”[3] ­– is at the center of a so-called “decolonial ecology.”[4]

Thinking and working within this perspective, the artist, DJ, poet, and community organizer Soñ Gweha articulates various strategies for inscribing pleasure and joy as tools for entering what they refer to as the “healing body.” Their transdisciplinary practice, spanning video, sculpture, installation, sound, and DJing, centers the power of queer eroticism and focuses on care, desire, friendship, and family bonds as sources for agency.

Soñ Gweha’s first solo exhibition in Austria, Quiet Storm Blowin’, unfolds as an archipelagic ecosystem of sorts composed to accommodate the rhythms and needs of the “healing body” as interrelated with the “producing body.” Constituting a multi-sensual landscape with a spiral core as its nucleus and various islands surrounding it like stages, Quiet Storm Blowin’ invites visitors to engage with it as a space for rest and dwelling, but also as a portal for encounter. A public program of workshops, DJ sessions, and performances hosted by Soñ Gweha together with local and international collaborators activates the show and transforms it throughout its duration.