Optimism and its afterlives.
Optimism and its afterlives
Matthew Galloway, Selina Ershadi, Jane Zusters and Naeem Mohaiemen
Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, Wellington
30 October – 5 December 2020
Curated by Simon Gennard
Optimism and its afterlives thinks around a series of transitional moments, gathering artists who have found themselves witness to, or bound up in, scenes of change, and proposing that art has the capacity to let us 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, it asks how art might help us hold on to a desire for worlds to come, and how it might allow us to weather what feels intractable or overwhelming.
Across registers at once urgent, lyrical, and searching, the works map disparate temporal and geographic terrains—a dam on the Mata-au Clutha River in Otago; the environmentalist scene in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in the 1980s; that same city as it appears today; an airport tarmac in 1970s Dhaka—occupying what Rebecca Solnit calls the “spaciousness of uncertainty” in order to speculate on what, whether through continuity or transformation, might be made from there. My own contribution, newly commissioned alongside Selina Ershadi’s, takes up the Clutha dam, extending an ongoing inquiry into the narratives that gather around hydro-power and the reshaping of the New Zealand landscape.
