Reclaiming Resilience

Resilience has become a buzzword of the last couple of decades. The deepening climate crisis, social, economic and, finally, territorial insecurities, have put resilience on the top list as a form of coping with the permanent emergency. The concept was quickly coopted by the neoliberal regime, in which resilience was transformed into a personal quality, a specific trait of character. According to a philosopher Mark Neocleous, such framing of this notion has a deeply political agenda – to put the responsibility on individuals in dealing with shocks in systems (ecological, political, financial): it wants us to learn to become resilient, to learn emergency planning, rather than changing the dysfunctional or crumbling systems themselves. This way, the poor, the non-normative or the colonized people are expected to be resilient to the unjust conditions instead of fixing those circumstances in the first place.

Resilience, however, is collective, rather than individual. It is a non-linear process that develops through interactions among people or people and their environment. The curated program of four solo exhibitions is an attempt to reclaim resilience from the neoliberalized agenda and explore it as a form of healing, a form of resistance, a form of endurance. As resilience is inevitably related to trauma, adversity and vulnerability, the source of these hardships need to be addressed critically in order to proceed to the stage of convalescence.

Through the practice of selected artists –Dominique White, Monia Ben Hamouda, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, and Bianca Bondi– such topics as resilient bodies, resilient communities and cultures as well as resilient matter will be explored. Together we’ll be looking for ways to nurture resilience as an empowering, communal effort, rather than a personalized labor of survival that is placed on the shoulders of individuals today.

Curated by Pakui Hardware.