We are living through and witnessing the entanglement of multiple forms of emergency: a global pandemic from a novel coronavirus, a climate crisis precipitated by the continued abuse of our environment, and the catastrophic legacies of violence, subjugation, and economic exploitation inflicted by white supremacy. If we are in a state of emergency as we witness the failure of the state, it is also important to recognize that the ‘ending of worlds’ and ‘ways of life’ have been for centuries an ongoing state of emergency for so many people, cultures, environments, and non-human life in the wake of colonialism and slavery. Today, connected and enmeshed as we are by our history and in our future, we face a profound reckoning with how to live, how to remember, and how to envision and re-make our world and our relations within it. This exhibition will explore how artists in this community across an array of disciplines and backgrounds engage the urgency of the present in which history lives to “imagine otherwise.”
Artists and designers are keenly suited for this re-imagining. We retrieve and bring to life fragments of history that have been lost. We make things visible that have been withheld and model what is possible in the face of impossibility. We take symbols, identities, programs, objects, and subjects from the world that are reduced or simplified and give them depth and complexity. We create new forms, materialities, hybridities, and emotions that give shape to different narratives, ideas, and representations in the creation of new histories. And we critically and poetically map the ways by which we can sustain both hope as well as our productive indignation.
