Studio Precarity designs the visual identity for “everything must change. RIS9”
The 9th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art titled “everything must change. RIS9” is curated by Nadja Argyropoulou and organised by the MOMus – Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki.
Biennale 9 echoes a common(place) yet recurrent, urgent, and fragile, plural and widely co-opted demand / slogan. It simultaneously subjects this slogan to the rigours of critique or better stated, to the practice of attending to what is emerging, to the care of witnessing, interpretation, accountability to the precision required in order for a change fair for all to be imagined and realized.
Through its works and overall character the exhibition points at the ways that the same phrase can be wielded by social revolutionaries and techno-fascists alike, by persecuted activists and authoritarian demagogues, by rival social classes and diametrically opposed collective forms of expression. In other words, it asks: amidst a world that often feels suffocatingly predetermined, compliant, entrenched, un-free, possessed, how can we reclaim the right to wander into complexity, the right to refuse, the joy of resistance, the choice of life over mere survival? What is the radical intelligence that ever, persistently creates everyday routes of escape to the insurgent ground of love?
A central inspiration is the rather untranslatable concept of “waywardness”, articulated by theorist and writer Saidiya Hartman in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, where Hartman reconstructs the “terrible beauty” of oppressed and marginalised black lives in early 20th-century New York. As she writes, “A revolution in a minor key unfolded in the city and young black women were the vehicle”, while forms of solidarity and love emerged outside conventions and the law[1].
As writer and academic Fred Moten remarks today, ‘We have to recognise that our struggle for liberation is given in the language of liberalism.’ How can a language, so brutally co-opted by genocidal, colonial capitalism, by an economy built on distraction and spectacle, remain vital and vibrant, active and transformative, accurate in its references and origins, yet not authoritarian and exclusionary? How can it still articulate the para—the alongside and beyond—that we inhabit and connect us with the alternative politics of pleasure, the mourning of loss, earlier and current struggles for social equality and justice, degrowth and environmentally engaged cosmopolitics, queer practices of care, Indigenous traditions and anti-colonial movements, eco-social alliances, and their solidarity-based agendas? How might it empower the proverbial canary in the coal mine? How can it inspire (without manipulating) desire to not settle for the proper and the proposed of thanatopolitics?
Through the visual frequency of the works displayed, the dialogues, the contradictions and entanglements, the exhibition is above all committed to explore kinships within the practice of thinking and highlight the possibility of radical change and emancipatory pluralism. It champions forms of collective action, vigilance and radical sympoietics that avoid the homogenizing silencing of contradictions and paradoxes, while emphasizing the realisation of free thought, the importance of small-scale stories of everyday disobedience, resistance, love, escape, and poetry that change the world from below and within.
Embracing “the aesthetics of bewilderment”, which fuses pleasure and questioning, frictions and fictions, clarity and blur, sensory participation and distancing – Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “critical fabulation”- the 9th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art breathes an air alive with the possibility of undeterred assembly, unruly gathering, aesthetic sociality.”
Under the direction of Thouli Misirloglou, the Artistic Director of MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art, which is the implementing institution of the event, the Biennale is co-organised with TIF-Helexpo, in partnership with the Municipality of Thessaloniki and the Thessaloniki Film Festival.
[1] In Hartman’s own words: “The acts of the wayward — the wild thoughts, reckless dreams, interminable protests, spontaneous strikes, riotous behavior, nonparticipation, willfulness and bold-faced refusal — redistributed the balance of need and want and sought a line of escape from debt and duty in the attempt to create a path elsewhere”, Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), p. 237
