Culture
16 April 2024
When Solidarity is Not a Metaphor - Curatorial Statement
Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez
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When Solidarity Is Not a Metaphor is inspired by the title of Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s seminal paper Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor (2012) in which the authors analyse the material violences of settler colonialism and land theft. They describe how generations inhabited by settlers’ feelings of guilt have found ways and forms of washing that guilt away through various psycho-political gestures and acts.
Solidarity that is not a metaphor, but a durational practice, aims at accountable and ethical gathering across individual stories into larger and significant social alliances. Contemporary art practices that express solidarity with causes fighting inhuman injustices inscribe themselves into political potentialities and actions that consider challenging and changing the governing positions through which power is performed.
The invited artists—alumni, residents, and collaborators of both the Cité internationale des arts in Paris and Alserkal Initiatives in Dubai–work in the form of long-term engagements, countering the understanding of ‘solidarity’ as merely an object of theorising and discourse.
Many of the featured artists share destinies of forced displacement and are doubly committed, both to igniting questions that address these displacements, and to sustaining ethical practices of production.
Works have grown during the women’s protests in Tehran, during a decades-long blockade in Gaza, during forced displacement from Ukraine or from Myanmar to France, or during life as a hostage in Khartoum. By thinking about all these extreme moments through transnational feminist perspectives, we are able to form alliances without much trouble— they all speak about the necessity to rise up and stand against injustices, as they concern each and every one of us.
16-21 April 2024
My Art Guides Venice Meeting Point
Navy Officers’ Club
Arsenale, Venice
Italy
Curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez
Created by Alserkal Initiatives in partnership with Cité international des arts
In collaboration with Lightbox
Find out more details about When Solidarity Is Not a Metaphor
Full list of artists here
Full programme here