Halea Isabelle Kala is a Berlin-based artist and facilitator. Driven by her curiosity and high levels of energy, she aims to create alternative ways of seeing and feeling by taking a trans-disciplinary approach to exploring the self and its environment. Working with a range of materials and media – from photography and moving image to illustration and collage, – she delves into the fabric of a colourful sphere of self-expression.
Her work is an appeal to muse on reality as a dynamic processual construction of the individual subject and investigates materiality, memory and experience in an age of convergence and hyper-stimulation, by examining truth and authenticity as forces acting upon our body and mind. She thereby encourages imagination for alternative realities, and provides tools for becoming more aware of the interconnectivity between mind, body, and nature. The concept of transmodernity is what drives her forward, in search for a conscious collectivity that transcends conventional divisions of identity. Transmodernity is an umbrella term for the new era that is commencing now, which takes elements of both modernity and postmodernity to create a movement that is based on interdisciplinary dialogue and expression, for a world embedded in a gift economy founded on love ethics.
In August 2013, she launched MUSÉ, a new platform that aims to be a connecting force that gives rise to a conscious community of individuals and groups that formulate visions for a just and sustainable present and future, by bringing together elements from the arts, pioneering academia, and innovative design, without neglecting the pleasures of popular culture. MUSÉ welcomes collaborations of all kinds and is open for commission, may it be in form of creative direction, photography, filmmaking, or event management.
For its debut exhibition, director Halea Isabelle Kala joins forces with Chinese photographer Gigi Luqi Wang to create the exhibition Poetic Memory: The Rest Is Noise. The presented works explore the meaning of memory and perception in a Digital Age that proliferates an inflation of information and hyper-stimulation, whilst delving into the notion of familiarity and the unknown. How do we relate to our memory? To our collective and individual past? How much control do we have over the perception of our environment? And to what extent is intimacy tied to identification and to understanding?
This assemblage of photographic works seeks to emancipate our senses and transcend linguistically formulated thought by allowing the mind to slow down and meander. Gigi evokes an enveloping sense of timelessness with her large-scale B/W photographs of remote rural scenery, which have an ethereal quality to them. Halea’s work resembles a gentle scrutiny of the urban landscapes of Hong Kong, Macao, and Shanghai, which she juxtaposes in pairs to reveal the fluidity of representation. Their different approaches address the potential for a re-appropriation of meaning, as part of a poetic dynamic process. The works thereby give rise to a new form of creative meditation in a realm of stunningly beautiful aesthetics, and present an impressive debut for MUSÉ.
MUSÉ is an intersection point that transcends physical space for an open-minded, playful and conscious community. It thereby performs hybrid activities usually carried out by galleries, agencies, producers, or publications, which can be specialized through collaboration. MUSÉ constitutes a mobile space and umbrella for events – such as exhibitions, parties, festivals and presentations – as well as an online and physical platform for creative production that integrates its appeal and philosophy.
Seductive, provocative, evocative.
For further information on Transmodernity please watch this – For more information on Halea’s work go here
Photos by Cornelius Carstens
