The exhibition “Social Unrest” is focused on contemporary revolts and uprisings, which have spurred a profound commotion in the analysis of forms of protest and collective violence. By observing its history, the project identifies a link between the latest manifestations of social unrest and a constellation of precedents, revealing their recursiveness in order to shed light on their structural causes.
Curated by Niccolò Gravina, with the historical research of Zoé Samudzi, the exhibition presents new productions by Tony Cokes, Ivan Cheng, Satoshi Fujiwara, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Tiffany Sia, and Sung Tieu, along with recent works by Alessandro Di Pietro and Hannah Black. All the artworks are the result of a dialogue with the artists that has lasted over two years, and of historical research that has initiated their creative process. The exhibition design by the architecture firm Sabotage Practice constructs an obstructive barricade within the gallery, operating as a shattered device through which the works are displayed.
The temporal and aesthetic constellation generated by the exhibition thus outlines a heuristic system that, traversing history, alludes to the structural reasons that give rise to riots. What emerges is a fragmented and incomplete chronology that acts as a montage, testing the limits of a collective artistic effort to address political and social issues. “Social Unrest” illuminates the ethical and epistemological collisions of these phenomena, without omitting their more obscure and violent aspects, but contradicting their presumed irrationality.
