Exhibition

9. February – 10. March 2023
Opening hours: Sat – Sun: 13:00–16:00
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Opening: 8. February, 18:00
Finissage: 10. March, 18:00

Pêdra Costa, Zosia Hołubowska, Anna T., Izabella Wilk Wolf, and Jul Zabowskx
Curated by: Zosia Hołubowska and Anna T.

Inspired by the ways in which the pandemic was discussed in media and art, as an irreversible rift of the social was going to upend systems of domination and oppression and usher us into a new future we want to contest that notion and instead point to the work and visions of communities that have worked long and hard to undo such systems for millenia. We want to highlight forms of knowledge that have been underestimated and overlooked and point to moments when binaries (be it the pre/post-COVID-19, gender, arts/crafts, science/magic, traditional/contemporary) were challenged through creative forms.

The pandemic exhibited how differently situated our longings for change are. A crump of seismic proportions created a void that was quickly repurposed and didn’t lead to a radical end of capitalism, as some had hoped. A wish, or a curse, that a real change needs an apocalypse to trigger it, can only be coined in the safety of a Western welfare state as a center of innovations. With this exhibition, we want to critically examine the idea of the portal as separating the new and the old and ask what it really means to change something. We chose to challenge the very distinction between the two and acknowledge the diverse knowledge/s that question the linearity of transition and talk, sing, dance, and dream about transformations. Our focus is non-binary logic/s that question what it means to function, to reason, to be (re)productive. 

Our curatorial concept critically approaches the idea of the portal as a rift between past and future as well as the longing for a clean-cut start after the pandemic.We invited artists who work on ideas of “non-binary logic”, through their anti-colonial performances, Mediterranean opacity studies, experiments with dis/functional apparatuses, and practices of undoing/ reimagining the archives and engaging with magic as political activism. These multifaceted practices stem from very different sociocultural contexts. At the core of each artist’s practice is challenging the power structures, liberation from oppression, and self-governance. All the practices are informed by intersectional queer-feminism with a focus on the visibility of the LGBTQIA+ community and migrant artists in their respective contexts. 

The exhibition through the installations, ready-mades, crafted textiles, videos, and audio works reimagines the pasts and discovers the futures. We hope that these reconfigurations and transformations will form a process in which we can reflect on the pandemic and its destructive harvest and approach it as an outcome of a much bigger crisis rather than an (un)foreseen disaster.