curatorial notes by Zasha Colah

The Joker Scans Berlin

From tiny windows high up in his headquarters, the Joker makes plans for world domination with healing lamps and cosmic vibrations. From his bird’s-eye view, “everything is ok”. Gaiety. Champagne. Lovers. Yet each person is their own waking Faust, lucid dream-walking down Oranienburger Straße, cradling their very own Mephistopheles to their ear, engrossed in negotiating equitable terms. Politicians fly down the street anxiously after sighting their own “nose”, asking, with deference, if it wouldn’t mind returning to their faces? The “nose”, wearing dark glasses, a long coat, and sneakers, shrugs them off with some change. Teachers, workers, and poets obediently scuttle to their next paycheck. Only when they cross each other in the darkness of the street, hysteria leaks from the huge whites of their eyes.

A sharp shoe now hits the pavement. “Slightly over forty. Crooked sort of mouth. Clean-shav-n. Dark hair. Right eye black, left eye for some reason green. Eyebrows black, but one higher than the other. In short, a foreigner.” Fits right in, passersby love the look. Only a gaping coldness empties their insides once they cross him, as though they had just been pilfered of their inner compass. As if to welcome him, every bookshop worth its salt is stocked with books on AI. University students model speculative devices to place under the tongue to instantly turn speech PC. Signs all over the city, and messages on media campaigns among the concert posters proclaim: “Dr. Bwanga, powerful Ng'aka [Witch Doctor] from Zambia is visiting Berlin!” Harnessing AI, his spiritual power can now reach the entire city. The Witch Doctor seems devilish, but Berlin’s denizens are drawn like moths, enchanted by rumors of Satan’s Great Ball, the Devil’s Feast for Thieves and Robbers.

Meanwhile, the first InterNational Conference for Beggars is to take place in Berlin. They will take a census of all the “modern” Beggars active in the world right now—from the student blockades in Serbia, the Tesla factory picketers, the Myanmar Civil Disobedience Movement, Yo No Coopero Con La Dictadura in Cuba, the retirees’ meeting at Plaza de Mayo every Wednesday, the Tercer Malón de la Paz in Argentina—to issue Gold Beggar Cards. Simultaneously, the first-ever protest is taking place on Mars. Interplanetary Begging! Everywhere, the Joker sees indifferent foxes against the magenta sky, while Augusto Boal’s “difficultators” run in all directions among the denizens.¹

Claiming

Sleek, tall, jet-black, with a white streak on the temple, I sighted a Mithun with curving horns, browsing tree leaves as a blue-green haze darkened the forest. The Mithun is a horse-like ox, a magical presence in the cool, high-altitude community forests in the Patkai hills in Indo-Burma. In the midst of the Naga peoples’ secessionist militancy from India—one that had, at times, assassinated its own moderate voices and rejected proposals advocating imaginative leaps in federalist structures— the Naga visionary politician, Rungsung Suisa, was rumored to have been seen deep in the forests, with a Mithun pulling a plough. This was a kind of madness— because the Mithun, revered for their magical wildness, do not work. They graze freely in the forests, and can be lured only with salt, which they love. Nor did it make any practical sense to drive plough marks through the sparse soil between trees on hill tracts not cleared for cultivation. But Suisa claimed that when they seek to draw the boundary of Naga Indigenous lands one day, these markings drawn into the ground will testify to the extent of the community forests. Laws, and the absolute power they conferred on the police force and military, ransacked civilian life and forest land alike. They run pell-mell across contemporary India, poised against a generation’s critical thinkers: Sedition Law 1860 (a colonial-era law); Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act 1958 (a colonial-era law, removed at independence, and returned); Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 1967; Public Safety Act 1978; National Security Act 1980; New Criminal Laws 2024 (BNS, BNSS, BSA); Finance Bill 2025 (overreach in digital scrutiny).

This rumored image of legal evidence in the form of absurd plough mark-making drawn, dug, and etched into the forest floor has remained with me for twenty years, shaping my understanding of legality as it pertains to the spoken or intentioned declaration accompanying mark-making, the charged speech act made plastic, for some future receiver of the sign. In this sense, the marking is a bone fragment of song, speech, story, or claim, held by the teeth in the cavity of the mouth. But orality is more than the mouth. The body, too, claims. Walking as a way of knowing, displacing densities of space as an act of claiming: “How do I show we belong to these boulders with our stories, the way we know how to tread in a landscape? Reading with one’s feet and hands. With the whole body rolling down slopes, digging into holes or caverns or feeling into the earth,” an artist told me in a conversation on social choreography. Orality is tactile knowledge, like the act of knotting histories with threads from trauma, or that of growing living bridges by shaping the roots of trees over hundreds of years. Orality has the capacity for fugitivity. Orality is what has transported the missing, unrecorded art histories, because it is fugitively transmitted. The live act before the censor-approved film.

Court and theater both stage contemporary orality. The former courthouse— punctured by holes—allows for an investigation of ideas of “legality and illegality”² but opposes the binary with the artist’s claim, and the artist’s ability to designate an action, or a readymade as an artwork. The urinal was once claimed as an artwork, but the act of saving a lake is the artistic claim of our times. Karl Liebknecht’s illegal speech against militarization, profiting only a handful of capitalists around the world, is reclaimed for today, where consumers are addressed, and therefore, each time we buy, we in fact exercise our capacity to vote. These sovereign claims stir the chagrin of the legal set, who insist that law should rest solely with the constitution. If the artist is now sovereign, then anything may be proclaimed. And yet, the aura of art in every single society has afforded arts’ protection, written into law, or preceding written enshrinement. Lawyers, at the same time, will remind us that the law holds some of the greatest work of science fiction, and its transforming into collectively-endowed social contracts, is what keeps the sheer grunt of violence at bay. Critical thinking can, after all, be trained for: but critical imagination?

foxing

Burlesque faces and comic gestures. Two flies among flowers subtly warn us against turning into one’s torturer. How one is prone to becoming the very thing one abhors. If the body in pain suspends thinking, humor reactivates it. Defiant laughter in the face of brutalization can restore meaning and open channels of dignity. A negotia- tion table draws us simultaneously to written codification, law-making, and accord writing—and back to a time when Berlin, the city, played host, standing at the center of international negotiation and the boundary-defining of nineteenth-century nation states, holding in their hands the international legal order, albeit one controlled by a handful of powers. In its sightline, a stairway leading down into an open ground stages a claim: that this walkable sculpture is a legislative hole in the national fabric. An international commons in the making, each stone belonging only to its assembly as a stairway. Not the flung stones leaving men languishing in prisons the world over, these stones are a bridge from the deep seabed to the initiative for dark and open skies, a bridge to another premise: “If inhabiting means remaining foreigners.”³

At the other end of the open ground, in the form of indigo paintings on woven nettle, is a wind-shaken counter-monument to a single electric post in what was once a waste heap in Nagaland. Non-violent acts of nighttime gardening fugitively reclaim a site of torture and death as a public space for the commons through artistic means. Both acts of conversion, converting adverse circumstances, are separated by an abyss. In this central ground or square, one must pass a threshold of sculptures made of speech and voice, instrumentation, call and response. The sorceress Mukamusaba stands lone, tall, in the center. One voice repeats, mandate, mandate, mandate. As though one needed to wait for a legal, moral directive to act. The artist’s claim, on the other hand, is always unauthorized, taken.

passing the fugitive on

The concept of fugitivity means the cultural ability of a work of art to set its own laws in the face of lawful violence. In 1987, Zarganar, Myanmar’s most famous comedian, wrote Beggars’ National Convention. He performed it several times with his troupe until 1990, when they were handcuffed immediately after stepping off the stage. As a mockery of parliament, the Beggars’ assembly is as outrageous as a gang of generals pretending to run a parliament. Though emphatically delighted, the audience was not so much implicated as endangered. This was not an avant-garde theater shaking the complacency of the bourgeoisie. Here was a performance turning its over-crowded, packed audience into outlaws through their laughter.

This is how imaginative acts or works are often preserved until they enter art history, carried fugitively in memory and body experience, as its audiences potentially hold, transmit, and transform them. That passage of transmission has long occupied my work: the unprogrammable, unpredictable moment, when an action of individual imagination becomes collective.

The exhibition title may be read as a missive or instruction piece to the receiver. Some fugitive burning ember escapes, and the audience is now the receiver of this redhot cultural evidence. Now they must themselves turn fugitive, run with it, pass it on, or keep it in hiding until it is transmissible, sayable.

The Joker’s Address

To my fellow outlaws:
No art.
Only wild acts of imagination.
No public program.
Only liveness: furtive, feral, poor in aesthetics—
bare life in transmission.
Reputation for cunning, an elongated rostrum, and a bushy tail
like the twitch of a shadow before it learns to flee.

The exhibition is not thematic.
It is propositional.
No identity politics—
it retrieves solidarity for all that we were never,
a fellowship of hunger and dusk,
flesh held loosely on bone.
No representational politics.
It is counter-monumental,
to every act of cultural homogeneity.
It is not anthropology or ethnography—
there are no glass cases,
it is not national, not even postcolonial.
It is earthly—
carnal, wind-scoured and scorched earth
sodden with rain and fox piss,
stitched to the edge of fields and flyovers.

The exhibition
moves like a city fox,
sinuous, sulfur-eyed.
It collects orality objects—
bone fragments of speech,
snatches of breath caught in spring thickets.
It steals acts of conversion—
the glint of the ordinary turning strange.
It difficultates artists’ claims—
drags them back into the dark.
It slows time—
each second drawn long like sinew,
each gesture weighted with cold.
It sniffs at the edges,
waits for silence,
steps forward with the patience of the hunted,
appears only when no one is watching—
and even then,
only half.

Zasha Colah

¹This paragraph contains quotes from or loose references to Nikolai Gogol, The Nose (1836) in The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories (London, 1915), 147–164; Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (London, 1967); Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross (London, 1980); Augusto Boal, Teatro del Oprimido [Theatre of the Oppressed] (Buenos Aires, 1974).

²Georg Lukács, “Legality and Illegality,” in History and Class Conscious- ness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA, 1971), 263–273.

³Title of Margherita Moscardini’s exhibition at Ex Elettrofonica, Rome, 2022.