Dear friends, in case you are in the region
this summer, Onkar Kular and I are participating in an exhibition in Antwerp
starting this week, best wishes Noam
|
Anthea
Hamilton, Augustas Serapinas, Donna
Kukama, Eloise Hawser, Ermias Kifleyesus, Guan Xiao, Haegue Yang,
Hedwig Houben, Iman Issa, Imran Qureshi, Juha Pekka
Matias Laakkonen, Katja Novitskova, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Liesbeth
Doms, Maria Safronova, Maria Taniguchi, Massimo Grimaldi, Nadezhda
Grishina, Nástio Mosquito, Oleg Ustinov, Onkar Kular
& Noam Toran, Oscar Murillo, Patrizio Di Massimo, Pedro
Barateiro, Pennacchio Argentato, Shilpa Gupta, Wu Tsang
Curated by Anders Kreuger and Nav Haq, M HKA
Don’t You
Know Who I Am? Art After Identity Politics is a group exhibition at M HKA, the Museum of
Contemporary Art Antwerp, reflecting how emergent artists relate to issues of
‘identity politics’ today.
“Don’t You Know Who I Am?” is a phrase we might expect
to hear from celebrities being refused entry to a nightclub, or politicians
trying to dissuade a policeman from giving them a parking ticket and expecting
to get away with it because of who they are. In this case it also refers to the
fact that many of the artists in the exhibition will be less well-known to a
wider audience. This exhibition, on both main floors of the M HKA, is intended
as a large-scale survey of the modes and means for considering identity and
identification.
Various
groups in society have, during recent decades, defined themselves along political,
economic or social lines such as race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality in order
to enhance their visibility and overcome marginalisation. After this
established discourse of identity politics, often associated with the art of
the 1980s, artists are once again considering notions of identity and what they
mean in the contemporary world.
Having
outgrown theoretical and visual modes that were too often focused on
representations of the self or the body, and that more than anything expressed
a desire for social visibility, artists today seem to be more interested in
identities (in the plural) as part of an overall understanding of
complexity—which the art system has not always been able or willing to
accommodate.
New
generations of artists interrogate the formation of identities in the world
through strategies such as performativity, abstraction, thingness, the logic
and aesthetics of the digital, activism, analysis of selfhood from cultural and
scientific perspectives or addressing the role of the viewer. These strategies
may not always reinforce each other, but artists have not accepted any ban on
self-contradiction.
Visual art
is still, at least in some ways, an avant-garde in relation to culture and
society as a whole. Yet it remains a place for experimentation, and many
artists, followed by curators and theoreticians, are asking themselves how they
can achieve an ever more nuanced and relevant understanding of what identity
means to individuals and their sense of self and how it can be articulated in creative
practice. The exhibition will invite and even provoke different perspectives
from the artists invited, as well as the audience and other participants in the
project, such as writers for the publication or speakers for the forum.
Don’t You
Know Who I Am? Art After Identity
Politics is organised in partnership with AIR Antwerp, who are hosting
residencies in Antwerp for participating artists. The project Someone
Else by Shilpa Guptais a site-specific installation
presented at the Permeke Library, close to Antwerp Central Station.
The
exhibition is accompanied by an e-book published in English, Dutch and French
versions, with contributions by Anders Kreuger, Nav Haq, Nida
Ghouse and Travis Jeppesen. It can be downloaded for free
from the project’s microsite afteridentity.muhka.be,
to be launched in June.
The exhibition is also accompanied by a one-day forum on 14 June, titled “Just Who Do You Think You Are?,” with keynotes, talks, performances and screenings by artists in the exhibition and invited speakers. The participants include Donna Kukama, Hedwig Houben, Lawrence Abu Hamdan,Merijn Oudenampsen, Nástio Mosquito, Pedro Barateiro, Timotheus Vermeulen and Travis Jeppesen. Their contributions will consider notions from “universality” and “populism,” to “selfhood,” “normality” and “difference,” all in relation to the “I word” of the exhibition subtitle. The forum is co-organised by CAHF (Contemporary Art Heritage Flanders) and held at Cinema Zuid, Antwerp.
M HKA is an initiative of the Flemish Community and supported by the City of Antwerp, the National Lottery, Klara, Cobra.be, H ART and Bank Degroof.
Don’t You
Know Who I Am? Art After Identity Politics is organised by M HKA within the framework of “The Uses of
Art,” a project by the European museum network L’Internationale.
It proposes a space for art within a non-hierarchical and decentralised
internationalism, based on the value of difference and horizontal exchange
among a constellation of cultural agents, locally rooted and globally
connected. L’Internationale comprises six major European museums: Moderna
Galerija (MG, Ljubljana, Slovenia);Museo Nacional Centro de Arte
Reina Sofía (MNCARS, Madrid, Spain); Museu d’Art Contemporani
de Barcelona (MACBA, Barcelona, Spain); Museum of Contemporary Art
Antwerp (M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium); SALT (Istanbul and Ankara,
Turkey) and Van Abbemuseum (VAM, Eindhoven, the Netherlands),
as well as associate organisations from the academic and artistic fields.
The project
is funded by the European Union’s Culture Programme for supporting this
exhibition throughL’Internationale. Funding is also contributed by the
Evens Foundation in Antwerp, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the
Embassy of Portugal in Brussels, Frame Visual Art Finland in Helsinki, the
Lithuanian Cultural Council in Vilnius and the Mondriaan Fund in
Amsterdam.
We thank
all our funders, our collaboration partners in Antwerp (AIR Antwerp, the
Permeke Library and the Heritage Library Hendrik Conscience) and our
coproduction partners CAC Vilnius in Vilnius, Galleria Zero in Milan, HISK
(Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten) in Ghent, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in
Berlin, Kunsthalle Lissabon in Lisbon and the Wilkinson Gallery in London.
