Fluid

The scene is reminiscent of a classic ballet studio setting: A dancer, unspectacularly dressed in a sports bra and sweatpants, rehearses movements while a choreographer gives instructions, corrects, and has the dancer repeat them. Except that Felipe Romero Beltrán's three-channel video installation Instruction (2022–23) isn't primarily about rehearsing a piece, but rather about transforming a social movement into an artistic one: The dancer Seu Kim and the choreographer and dancer Lucía Helena You work together with Bilal Sasse, a migrant from Morocco whom Beltrán had already portrayed in his series Dialect (2020–23). ​​Together with You, Sasse attempts to translate the boat journey from Morocco to Europe into dance. Instruction shows the “collaborative search for a choreography” that “creates a physical expression” for the factual events as well as “experiences, memories and feelings”.

Beltrán's video installation is at the center of States of Rebirth — Body Images in Motion, a small exhibition at PHOXXI, the photo art branch of Hamburg's Deichtorhallen. It's about bodies and movement, not necessarily in the sense of moving images or dance, although Beltrán explores both perspectives with Instruction. Indeed, movement here can also be understood as temporal movement, as a process in which body images change. Or as a social movement, as bodies that change location in the course of migration. And, last but not least, as a fluid concept: what seemed fixed yesterday has long since taken on a different form through movement. The consequence of this is that the exhibition is extremely undogmatic: where everything is in motion, fixed categories are of little help.

Which has consequences for the genre. Of course, many of the artists shown work with photography, appropriate to the location, but it usually remains unclear whether what they show is actually photographic art. When Isaac Chong Wai, for example, shows twelve images of a falling group in Falling Reversely — Collective Fall 1 (2022), we are undoubtedly dealing with photographs. On the other hand, this work is not primarily about the photos themselves, but about the performative act of falling. It is preceded by a photograph called Portrait: The evening I was beaten up by a stranger with a glass bottle (2015) which shows the artist with a hematoma on his cheek — here, too, the performative act of a violent assault overshadows the aesthetic form of photography.

It is such movement patterns that characterize States of Rebirth. KhingWei Bai's photographs Du bist mein Traummann (You are my dream man) (2022), for example, appear at first glance like sober documentations of queer nightlife, but are underpinned by an otherness fetish that Asian-identified men have to deal with when dating. in Farren Van Wyk's series Mixedness is my Mythology (2021–24), family portraits are enriched with racist poses. Neither photography nor movement are innocent in this exhibition, cleverly curated by Nadine Isabelle Henrich.

Until 17 August in Hamburg, PHOXXI;
www.deichtorhallen.de