Aishwarya Kumar with N▲N▼
Doing All the Wrong Things the Wrong Way

Doing All the Wrong Things the Wrong Way

As part of the broader programme of The Wrong Biennale, Doing All the Wrong Things the Wrong Way is a podcast series that brings together artists and curators from Down The Rabbit Hole Pavilion, Antecâmara, and Institution(ings) to examine how emerging formats of artistic research, spatial affordance, and institutional reconfiguration critically unsettle conventional modes of exhibition-making.

Episode #3: Untranslatable Encounters features multidisciplinary Brazilian artist N▲N▼ (pronounced: Nany) in conversation with Aishwarya Kumar. Moving across performance, ritual, language, and black feminist thought, the episode reflects on artistic practice as a site of refusal, opacity, and ongoing negotiation rather than resolution.

Framed by the provocation that four decades after Sister Outsider, white feminist platitudes continue to circulate unchallenged, the conversation draws on Audre Lorde’s call for an “ample, spilling” feminism—one that centres anger, care, and lived contradiction as critical forces.

The discussion unfolds along two trajectories in Nany’s most recent work: Orin Ifê, which engages ritual practices from the Ketu and Ngô regions to question the fragile boundary between performance and appropriation; and Reciprocation, an upcoming performance work that exposes the dramaturgical, technical, and ethical negotiations involved in making live work. By placing a completed work alongside one still in formation, the episode foregrounds process, vulnerability, and responsibility as central to artistic research.
Situated within Down The Rabbit Hole Pavilion, the episode attends to untranslatability as method—where meaning emerges through proximity, repetition, and partial understanding, and where black histories are approached not as fixed narratives but as living, contested, and continuously remade.