Sedje Hémon. Imran Mir. Abdias Nascimento

SEDJE HÉMON. EMOTION OF SPIRITS
“The logical explanation is the relationship between painting and music, both of which live in me and my work as a spiritual intermediary”, said Sedje Hémon. For decades, Hémon’s multifaceted practice was lightyears ahead of the way artistic practice has been understood within the West. Hémon described her paintings as music compositions and their abstract forms are to be read as scores in relation to various musical parameters such as duration, pitch and timbre, while fulfilling her theory of the “integration of the arts.” This was her effort to make comprehensive the common origin and intersectionality of all arts and sciences. The title of her tryptic takes its cue from an eponymous painting titled Émotion des Esprits. And like many of her works reveal, Hémon’s practice was a deep deliberation on natural sciences and epistemologies shaped by her lived experience as shoah survivor and resistance. Sedje Hémon excelled in the making of cut-outs, sculptures, musical instruments like the Hémon Pan Flute and method, as well as inventing medical devices and corrective prosthetics. In 1955, she debuted a career as a painter in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles group exhibition Comparaisons at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since then her works have been presented by orchestras like the Athens Symphony Orchestra and in few exhibitions across Europe. In 2017 her work was presented at documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel.

IMRAN MIR. A WORLD THAT IS NOT ENTIRELY REFLECTIVE BUT CONTEMPLATIVE
The contemplative nature of Imran Mir’s work, the way the works, like essays or theses, in their forms and ideas elaborate on mathematics in general and geometry in particular, give an insight into how physics and the sonic is of consequence. The title of Imran Mir’s exhibition stems from an essay Beyond the Narcissism of the Self by artist and critic, Rasheed Araeen, in which he writes “it seems Imran Mir is turning his back to this mirror-image in an attempt to create a world that is not entirely reflective but contemplative, so that what emerges from it transcends the earthly needs of the body and its pictorial representation.” Born in Karachi in 1950, Imran Mir was an artist who excelled in painting and sculpting, a designer and conceptualizer of advertisements. He graduated from the Central Institute of Arts and Crafts Karachi in 1971 and obtained his master’s degree in communication design from Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, in 1976. He returned to Pakistan in 1978 and engaged as an artist challenging the norms of what art in Pakistan could be, but also as an award-winning designer of over 5000 logos and advertisements. He was one of the founding members of the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. This solo exhibition at the Stedelijk will be Imran Mir’s first major exhibition in the Netherlands and Europe, and will be accompanied by a reader of the work of Imran Mir.

ABDIAS NASCIMENTO. BEING AN EVENT OF LOVE
The presentation of Abdias Nascimento’s work is structured in five chapters and trajectories that flowed through his whole oeuvre: Activism, Passage, Sexuality, Symbolism/Semiology and Theogony. Nascimento’s work defies the categories of figuration or abstraction, as the gods, the human, the geometric structures, the spiritualities and cosmogonies he evokes or depicts exist beyond those categories. Using symbols, myths, concepts and aphorisms from ancient Egypt, the Yorubas or the Ashantis, Nascimento’s painting practice over four decades can be seen as a compendium of aesthetic, philosophical and political discourses on Blackness and resistance and resistance in Blackness.

Abdias Nascimento founded the Black Experimental Theater (1944) and the Black Art Museum project (1950) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He organized the National Convention of Brazilian Blacks (1946) and the 1st Congress of Brazilian Blacks (1950). While curating the Black Arts Museum project, he began developing his own creative work. In exile from the military regime (1968 —1982), he exhibited widely in the U.S., where he served as Full Professor at the State University of New York. On return from exile he founded the Afro-Brazilian Studies and Research Institute (IPEAFRO), which organized the 3rd Congress of Black Culture in the Americas (1982).