DENISE FERREIRA da SILVA and ARJUNA NEUMAN

2023

Aug 25

4 Waters: Deep Implicancy, 2018 - 2019
single channel HD video
30 minutes
Produced with the support of Arts Council England (UK), Hannah Barry Gallery (UK), and the University of British Columbia Social Justice Institute (GRSJ) (CA) and the Critical and Creative Social Justice Studies Research Excellence Cluster (CA)

Riverside Park

4 Waters: Deep Implicancy is a collaborative project by Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva, in which they bring together “a set of fragments drawn from a reimagined cosmos.” They explain, “These fragments, sounds, and stories help us convey the experiential moment of entanglement, or rather, they describe an entangled moment prior to separation, what we call ‘Deep Implicancy’.” 1

Just as the framework for Luminocity 2023 centers on water as a key element, Ferreira da Silva and Neuman emphasize and follow water as a substance that can absorb and contain matter while flowing through disparate geographies. The video traverses four bodies of waters: the Mediterranean Sea and the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, and four islands within them–Lesvos, Haiti, Marshall Islands, and Tiwi. 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy challenges colonial hierarchies of rational experience and provides an expansive notion of a world without time, measurement, or notions of value. Framed within a planetary view of the world as a space completely filled with matter (corpus infinitum), water is presented as a life-giving source in which the human, geological, bacterial, and meteorological are emmeshed and flow together. The video offers an immersive visual and philosophical journey through a reimagined cosmos.

The artists’ years of collaborative research include interviews, essays, and songs on topics such as coral islands, bacterial communication, and earthquake-triggered liquefaction in Haiti. Through a rich collage of natural imagery, sound, and text, the artists consider urgent global issues including migration, displacement, legacies of colonialism, and ecological devastation. Together they ask, “What if our image of the world recalled phase instead of measure? And what becomes of ethics if we let go of value?” 2

Artist Biographies

Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures, New York University. Her artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of Unpayable Debt, 2022;  Dívida Impagável, 2019;  and  Toward a Global Idea of Race, 2007. Her articles have been published in journals including Social Text; Theory, Culture & Society; philoSOPHIA; Griffith Law Review; Theory & Event and The Black Scholar, among others. She has taught at University of California San Diego, University of British Columbia, and Queen Mary University of London, and  visited Birkbeck University of London, University of São Paulo, Université de Paris VIII, and is currently an Adjunct Professor at Monash University Architecture, Design, and Art and a faculty at the European Graduate School.

Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. His films and installations have been shown internationally, including in Berlin Biennial, Manifesta, Sharjah Biennial and in museums such as Centre Pompidou, Madre Museum, Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Portugal, and Jameel Art Centre. As a writer, he has published essays in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings Journal, and e-flux. He studied at California Institute of the Arts. He works with the essay form with a multi-perspectival and mobile approach where “essay” is an inherently future-oriented and experimental mode, becoming the guiding principle for research and production, which shifts between the bodily, haptic, and affective through to the geopolitical, planetary, and cosmological.

Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s collaboration includes the film Serpent Rain, 2016, 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy, 2018, and Soot Breath//Corpus Infinitum, 2020. Their films have been exhibited at Pompidou Center, Paris; Whitechapel Gallery, London; The 56th Venice Biennale; The Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin; Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow; Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf; and Arnhem Museum, Netherlands. They were the 2021 feature artists at the Flaherty Seminar and their work is held in the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery’s Collection at the University of British Columbia. In 2023, they are showing the ensemble of their films at the MACBA (Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona), and they will premiere their new film Ancestral Clouds, Ancestral Ghosts  in October at the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna.

1. Arjuna Neuman, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Official Selection Berlinale 2019 - Forum Expanded Exhibition - Group Exhibition at Betonhalle.

2. Ibid.