Each year Artspace Aotearoa orbits one question in the company of artists and through exhibitions. In 2024 we ask “do I need territory?” We continue our exploration of this question with Joie noire, the first solo exhibition in the Moana-nui-a-Kiwa region, of Guadeloupe-born, Berlin-based artist Jimmy Robert, our inaugural Goethe-Insitut Visiting Practitioner. Breaking down divisions between two and three dimensions, subject and object, Joie noire is a reinterpretation of Robert’s seminal performance of the same title, debuted at KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin in 2019, developed especially for Artspace Aotearoa.

Joie noire traverses the breadth of life’s edges; the euphoric power of club culture, the isloating nature of weaponised illness and associated death, and the many, often surprising places where solidarity is found. The work emerges as Robert explores interlocking contexts including the gay club scene of New York in the late 1970s, the AIDS epidemic, and access to care. These contexts are drawn together in the gallery where we are invited to move with our own bodies through elements of the original performance including photography, audio, video, spatial interventions, documentation and reading lists. Navigating these elements we can become performing agents ourselves, our bodies registering as sites of self-determination and sites of limitation.

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Biography Jimmy Robert was born in Guadeloupe (1975) but has lived in Berlin for the last decade. He works across a range of media including photography, sculpture, film, video, and collaborative performance. He studied at Goldsmiths, London, was a resident at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam and is now a professor at UdK, Berlin. He has had major solo exhibitions at, amongst others, Moderna Museet, Malmö; Centre National de la Danse, Paris-Pantin in collaboration with Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Museion, Bolzano; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham; and The Power Plant, Toronto and has participated in numerous significant group exhibitions including the 8th Berlin Biennale, 11th Dak'Art, Dakar, 5th Aichi Triennale, and the 7th Gwangju Biennale.