Experience this durational and meditative performance that weaves together identity, history, and culture.
In the durational performance We’re Magic. We’re Real # 3 (These Walls), Jeannette Ehlers employs hair, an important identity marker among the African diaspora, as a simple yet powerful gesture. Connected to PAMM’s third floor terrace by long cornrows, the performers move back and forth, slowly but insistently. Blending in with the hanging gardens, the hair creates a poetic metaphor for the relationship between culture and nature, body and landscape, history and the present. Grief and strength are present in equal measure in this meditative performance. Accompanied by the sound of the roar of the Atlantic, it expresses a yearning for life outside the plantation system, and for the forest as a literal and symbolic sanctuary. This performance was originally commissioned by Mads Norgaard and first performed in November 2021.
Ehlers’s We’re Magic. We’re Real # 3 (These Walls) is part of Beyond Representation, a research project and performance series that investigates a broad range of performance and performative practices by artists from the Caribbean or of Caribbean descent working in the region or its diasporas.
About Jeannette Ehlers
Jeannette Ehlers is an artist of Danish and Trinidadian descent based in Copenhagen. She graduated from the Royal Danish Academy in 2006. Ehlers’s practice takes shape experimentally across photography, video, installation, sculpture, and performance. Her works often deal with decolonial hauntings, and she insists on the possibility of empowerment and healing in her art, honoring the legacy of resistance in the African diaspora. She unites the historical, the collective, and the rebellious with the familial, the bodily, and the poetic. In the words of writer Lesley-Ann Brown, “Ehlers reminds everyone who participates in or looks at her work that history is not past.” Ehlers was nominated to create a national monument to the Windrush generation at London Waterloo station in 2021 as well as a decolonial monument in Braunschweig Germany, in 2023. She is cocreator with La Vaughn Belle of the I Am Queen Mary transnational public art project (2018). She has participated in numerous group shows internationally. Her solo exhibitions include Crossing Waters: Ripples of Tomorrow at Le Bicolore (2024); Archives in the Tongue: A Litany of Freedoms at Kunsthal Charlottenborg (2022); Take Root at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2021); Whip it Good: Spinning from History’s Filthy Mind at Autograph ABP in London (2015); and Say It Loud! at Nikolaj Kunsthal (2014).
