Optimism and its afterlives.
Optimism and its afterlives
Matthew Galloway, Selina Ershadi, Jane Zusters and Naeem Mohaiemen.
Curated by Simon Gennard
30 October – 5 December
2020
Optimism and its afterlives thinks around a series of transitional moments, including works by artists who have found themselves witness to or bound up in scenes of change.
Featuring newly commissioned projects by Matthew Galloway and Selina Ershadi, alongside works by Jane Zusters and Naeem Mohaiemen, Optimism and its afterlives proposes that art has the capacity to allow us to linger with the surprise, disarray, bafflement and hope of best-laid plans and unmet expectations. More a call to attention than a call to arms, the exhibition asks how art might aid us to maintain a desire for worlds to come, and how it might enable us to weather what feels intractable, immovable or overwhelming.
Spanning registers that are at once urgent, lyrical and searching, Optimism and its afterlives maps disparate temporal and geographic terrains—from a dam on the Mata-au Clutha River in Otago, to the environmentalist scene in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in the 1980s, to that same city as it appears today, to an airport tarmac in 1970s Dhaka. The works gathered here occupy what Rebecca Solnit calls the “spaciousness of uncertainty,” to speculate on what—whether a matter of continuity or transformation—might be made from there.