The collaborative practice of Joana Atemengue Owona and Dejvi Haxhi is an inquiry into the unstable relationship between the self, language, and the structures through which meaning is produced. Drawing, among other things, on the psychoanalytic distinction between the lived “je” and the socially constituted “moi”, their practice works through appropriated images, language, voice, and associative material. An experimental arrangement emerges which repeatedly fails to coincide, while moving through absurdity, interruption, repetition, and semantic dislocation. At the centre of their practice is a question they repeatedly return to: how can we speak about something that resists language?
Failure is not treated as a limitation, but as a method. Their approach is characterised by the assuredness that whatever this project entails, it is doomed to fail. When speaking about the inexpressible, language always fails. The artists perspective on the media they use, seek to find the closest point of proximity without merging completely. Through this careful and sometimes even absurd, almost nonsensical set of rules they attempt to approach that which evades language – through which, maybe, just maybe, some meaning is to be found.
Joana Atemengue Owona (b. 1998) is a visual artist currently pursuing an MFA at the HFBK Hamburg. During her studies, she spent time as an Erasmus student at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Owona’s work has been exhibited at venues including the Afrolution Festival organised by Each One Teach One e.V. in Berlin, the MARKK – Museum am Rothenbaum, the Reeperbahn Festival, Schloss Agathenburg, and the Kunstverein Gastgarten in Hamburg. In 2025, she received the Deutschlandstipendium, and in 2026, the Master’s Scholarship from the Freundeskreis of the HFBK.
Dejvi Alfred Haxhi, born in Albania in 1997, lives and works in Hamburg. He first completed a BFA in fashion design, then continued studying fine art, and has worked as an artist ever since. He is currently studying philosophy and cultural studies at the University of Hamburg and volunteers at the Institute for Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies (IPPK) in Hamburg. His interests lie in the tension between art, politics, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics. His work is shaped by the interplay of artistic practice and theoretical reflection.
The reading will take place as part of our exhibition if words are to be sounded.
You are warmly invited to also attend the performance by Sophie Seita on November 12, 2026, and the workshop with Noelle BuAbbud on November 14, 2026, both of which touch upon the topics of the reading with their own perspectives.
Funding
As part of the PERSPEKTIVE fund for contemporary art & architecture, an initiative of the Bureau des arts visuels of the Institut français d’Allemagne. Supported by the French Ministry of Culture, the Institut français Paris and the Goethe Institut.
Funding GAK Bremen: Karin und Uwe Hollweg Stiftung, Beate + Hartmut Schaefers Stiftung, Partnerschaften für Demokratie in Bremen, gefördert vom Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend im Rahmen des Bundesprogramms Demokratie leben, Sparkasse Bremen, Senator für Kultur der Freien und Hansestadt Bremen