Not Cancelled 2020: Chronicles of Exile, Letters of Return
What art can accomplish that news cannot? Conceived against the background of justified indignation and not infrequent despair, this exhibit seeks to amplify the figurative aspect of confinement. Forced upon us by the tragic and disruptive circumstance of the global epidemic, on some occasions this unsolicited isolation is not without promise. Expulsion, suspension, interruption, parenthesis, cancellation.... Whatever rhetoric the present artworks assume, they search to acknowledge this unexpected turning to self-renewal. Rather than intending conclusions, the exhibit aims to array the evidence of such a turning, however tentative or uncertain it is bound to feel. With the ambition perhaps too wild to acknowledge, these artwork seek a complicated image of personal strength, and reach for a way of being centered on the relations to others, rather than on the security of social status, expansion of the self or nostalgia for daily pleasures the epidemic has put on hold.