SUMMERSWAP: Mourning a revolution
Mourning a revolution gathers a group of emerging artists to reflect on the distant promises of past revolutions, in light of rising authoritarianism. The project emerged from a shared sense of urgency between the curators, following the recent growth of the far-right in Portugal, their home country. A similar situation is taking place all around the world, and as these movements grow, what once were radical promises of liberation are now being toppled by authoritarian ideas.
Should one mourn those revolutionary promises? Or, would that be accepting defeat? Can one preserve the seeds of a revolution to use in the future? Or, do we need something new entirely? What is the appropriate response when grieving has become a permanent state—grieving the passivity, complicity, and failure of institutions, governments, or democracy itself? The exhibition guides us through these questions. Coming from places where the echoes of revolution still linger, the artists touch on themes of memory, imagination, and resistance.
Program:
Next Friday, on August 1st, the exhibition will pre-open with a ‘Suspension Moment’, a workshop by TogetherTogether collective! We will rehearse ways of suspending what stops us from living otherwise, to dream and start practicing a different world already.
On August 6th, during our opening, there will be performances by Golnoosh Heshmati, ‘What is left to listen to now?’ at 19:00, and Cemre Eraslan, ‘Life Pointer’ at 20:00.
On August 29th, TogetherTogether collective will host their second and last Suspension Moment: ‘Whispering bodies: scores for the we’. This performance tells a story about the search for collectivity, the joys and frictions of shaping a ‘collective body’, visualizing the intangible relations between bodies and surroundings.
With works by
Cemre Eraslan
Clara Bolota
Golnoosh Heshmati
Igor Ripak
Nadežda Kirćanski
Salomé Lopes
TogetherTogether
Curated by Salomé Lopes and Zé Lourenço
For more info, follow @mourningarevolution! You can also support them through their campaign on Voordekunst.
At the peak of summer and the depth of winter, we open up our showroom for emerging visual talent from Rotterdam and beyond. Each year, MaMA receives numerous proposals for different exhibitions-ideas – both from within our community and from artists that are not connected to us – not yet. Our SWAP-program is a way to offer these talents a platform to present their work. This time we hand the mic over to Mourning a Revolution.
Cemre Eraslan (b. 1998, Istanbul) is an artist and researcher based in The Hague. She investigates the kinds of novelties present in everyday recursion through the lens of speculative game and apparatus making — by setting up performances and installations that play with iterative prototyping, pattern recognition and improvisation as formative methods. Figures like the ‘Melon’ become oracular third-places where the happenstance of the organic becomes a revelatory conduit.
Clara Bolota (b. 1998, Lisbon) works on the relationship between language and materiality and the myriad ways through which psychic processes become tangible realities. Through found objects — an accumulation of triggers or pieces of time collected — she begins a symbiotic process of digestion and transformation of memory. Influenced by psychoanalysis, mysticism, cinematography and philosophy of language, as well as a strong awareness of Portugal’s colonial past, she reflects on generational trauma, spirituality, community and violence.
Golnoosh Heshmati (b. 1992, Tehran) is an artist, researcher, and curator based in Rotterdam. Her practice merges artistic and curatorial approaches, focusing on creating dialogues within the fragmented archives of everyday life through listening, text, sound, ceramics, and performance. She co-founded Rabt, a nomadic space dedicated to community engagement focusing on sonic practices, and is a member of Khamoosh, an artistic research community that mediates conservation and restoration by exploring the sonic heritage of Iran.
Igor Ripak (b. 1992, Zrenjanin, Yugoslavia) is an artist and a photographer based in Vienna. In his practice he is relying on transformative processes of transmedia adaptation, emphasizing socio-political topics that code our everyday reality. Igor heavily relies on the medium of photography, either using it as means of documentation or to harness its ability to transcend political and emotional meaning. He is interested in post-truth phenomena and the processes that favor one’s opinion when they imagine the past. He is attentive of one’s identity and the neoliberal malaise that shapes it and torments it.
Nadežda Kirćanski (b. 1992, Zrenjanin, Serbia) is a visual artist based in The Hague. Her artistic practice employs a range of media including drawings, objects, phrases, situations and site-sensitive installations. Through her practice, she discovers and unfolds the hidden emotional, physical and intellectual labor embedded in the collision between socio-political realities and contemporary language. She is interested in how hidden labor gets phrased, described, gesticulated, articulated, or abbreviated.
Salomé Lopes (b. 1998, Almada, Portugal) is a visual artist and researcher whose practice centres on the human relationships established with mythical, religious and political narratives. Based on a long research process, her work materializes as trans-disciplinary installations, where narratives can be inhabited and experienced. She seeks to question the metaphysical principles that structure reality, through what she calls speculative-historical fictions — in which a different past may open possibilities of alternative futures.
TogetherTogether — Juliana Acero (b. 1992, Chiquinquirá, Colombia), Stefano Cattani (b. 2000, Civita Castellana, Italy), Carmen Draxler (b. 1998, Leipzig, Germany), Laura Flethe (b. 1999, Dissen, Germany) and Rita Gaspar (1993, Lisbon) — is an artistic research collective based in The Hague. Driven by the need of resisting individualization and alienation, they use a collaborative practice to create spaces for counter narratives that spark hope in a paranoiac world. Their work unfolds through embodied experiences, learning with the body, sharing stories, and building meaningful encounters for repairing social fabrics of care.
Zé Lourenço (b. 2001, Lisbon) is a lecturer of Political Science at University of Amsterdam and an aspiring textile artisan based in the Hague. His research interests surround topics of democratic practices, social justice and revolution.
