GROUP EXHIBITION

Featuring 11 artists working across different environments and through varied approaches exploring ideas of memory and recollection, dreams and wonder, in a world that is increasingly fragmented and disparate, and in which the earth more and more resists the processes that lay down meaning from above. The exhibition strives to unravel the invisible connections that bind these shared realities, through diverse threads by each artist interweaving into a sensory environment with visual, auditive and performative elements.

The title of the exhibition is a quote from French literature Nobel-prize laureate Annie Ernaux and is a memento to the idea of art as a way to fight against the inevitability of forgetting. We juxtapose these ideas to a Buddhist understanding of enlightenment. The original meaning of the state of nirvana (the reaching of the enlightened state), translated from Sanskrit actually refers to an extinguishing flame, even a blowing out. Thinking about art as an act of preservation is thus contrasted with an idea of loss of self, a self as an empty signifier, evacuated of identity and attachments, dispersed into a ‘we’ including the earth.