The obelisk is a monolith, a 200 tonne single piece of rock that has seen more sunrises than I can conceive of. I wonder how many died in the process of its creation, in the storm of its movement...

There is a time capsule inside the pedestal on which the obelisk is mounted, it contains images of the 12 most attractive ladies of England from the year 1878; What is the role of worship within our relationships? What, or who, do you worship? What do we want to remain of our time here?

Time makes me small, and yet I can touch this time through the stone - does this time touch back? Does it speak? And if I listen, what does it say?

The writing says that this rock was gift, whose is it to give the gift of time, of the labour of honouring something or someone now forgotten, or alive under a new name. Sun, Moon...gods assume new names and persist. Time and weather, movements of god.

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SERAFINE1369’s performance I I I (something flat, something cosmic, something endless) that was supposed to be shown during our opening unfortunately had to be postponed, but we are happy to get a glimpse of their work already now. We look forward to presenting their live performance very soon. 
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BIO

SERAFINE1369 was previously working under the name Last Yearz Interesting Negro (2016-2020) and is the artist and dancer (++) Jamila Johnson-Small. SERAFINE1369 works with dancing as a philosophical undertaking, a political project with ethical psycho-spiritual ramifications for being-in-the-world; dancing as intimate technology. Their work is informed by research into movement and dance as a tool for divination, decoding messages from an oracular body – on personal/structural/symptomatic/somatic/psychic levels – to be processed through the medium of choreography. Always thinking about the metabolic – impact and exchange through/in/as movement. Their shows work with darkness, voice, bass, words, texture, energies and sculptural objects to create stage/dreamspace/battleground, decompositions, atmospheric landscapes created through the live unfolding of the tensions between things that produce meaning.

SERAFINE1369 has a relational, cumulative and often collaborative practice, gathering and transmitting information through working in various constellations, at different scales and in different roles to build spaces for communing/attuning/communicating through dancing, performance, listening and conversation; spaces that might hold the complex, multiple and contradictory, spaces that consider movement and transformation as inevitable, working to be unsettling situations of non-dominance.

Usually based in London they were Torchlight Artist at Siobhan Davies Studios from 2019 - 2021, won the Arts Foundation Futures Award for Visual Art in 2019 and are the In-House Artist in Residence at Gropius Bau, Berlin for 2021/22.

https://www.basictension.com/
https://www.instagram.com/serafine1369/