With Fruit from Saturn, the Center for Persecuted Arts in Solingen is showing a solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Heba Y. Amin (*1980 in Cairo, Egypt)

The exhibition title Fruit from Saturn refers to the eponymous volume of poetry by the German-French poet Yvan Goll published in 1946. Atom Elegy, the book's opening poem, was created as a result of the promises of an “age of atomic power,” which seemed to involve utopias of progress and modernity. After dropping the first atomic bomb and the destructive force it unleashed, Goll reworked the poem.

Techno-utopian ideas, as they manifest themselves in characteristic mechanisms of hegemonic power, form the core of Heba Amin's work. In her cross-media works, the artist uses Goll's poetry to visualize power and authority exercised through technology. Fruit from Saturn highlights the weak points of a nation-state paradigm and the technological violence evoked by national sentiments. The artist shows us how — characterized by colonial warfare and failed political movements in North Africa — technologies are used to consolidate hegemonic power.

Fruit from Saturn shows us how landscape serves as an expression of prevailing political power. Amin's new works are dedicated to narratives about the German Africa Corps and its long-lasting presence in northern Egypt. In the exhibition at the Center for Persecuted Arts, her research focuses on the story of a Nazi pyramid located in El Alamein, a memento mori of a German fighter pilot killed in World War II, who was called the “Star of Africa.” In contrast, in a series of new photographs, Heba Amin shows herself as a land surveyor from Africa who uses an optical device to appraise and map German landscapes at night — technological progress as a story of empires and colonial exploitation.

Part of the Fruit from Saturn exhibition is Amin's ongoing multichannel video installation Speak2Tweet. A collection of voice messages sent during the so-called Arab Spring of 2011 following the nationwide shutdown of Internet access. The Speak2Tweet project shows the paradox of communication technologies, disguised as utopian promises of democratic expression, and the orphaned urban structures as a reflection of the lasting effects of a corrupt dictatorship.

While Yvan Goll sees the process of nuclear fission as the alchemy of an acquisition of knowledge, Heba Amin emphasizes the repressive effects of technological interventions in North Africa over the past century. But artist and poet illuminate the same core of power, fed by technology and hegemony. The Center for Persecuted Arts collection of Yvan Goll's work comprises the original, unpublished manuscript of Atom Elegy, which is being shown publicly for the first time as part of the exhibition.

Heba Amin took part in numerous international exhibitions. Her works were shown at the 10th Berlin Biennale, the 15th Istanbul Biennale, the Kunsthalle Bremen (Böttcherstraße Art Prize 2018), MAXXI Rome, FACT Liverpool, the Kunsthalle Wien, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the MOCAK Krakow, the Kunstverein Hamburg, at the 9th Forum Expanded Exhibition of the Berlin Berlinale or the IV Moscow International Biennale for Young Art. Amin grew in Cairo and completed her Master's degree in Fine Arts (MFA) at the University of Minnesota. She currently teaches at Bard College Berlin, is a doctoral scholar in art history at Freie Universität Berlin and a 2019 Field of Vision scholar in New York. She is also a co-founder of the Black Athena Collective, visual art curator for the US Mizna Journal, and co-curator of the Random Association (IT)'s DEFAULT residency program.

A catalogue will be published for the exhibition. | With the generous support of Zilberman Gallery

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