WISHFUL THINKING (ANY FOUNTAIN I COULD FIND)
"SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF!" (?)
Residency Unlimited
New York (USA)
A point of departure in visual research as part of a 3-month residency with Residency Unlimited (New York), Wishful Thinking explores the affectual embodiment and disembodiment of Hope, of tossing the coin and making a wish. Curious to understand the slippage of hopefulness and hopelessness, Siahne walked around New York for three months making wishes, the only rule made was it had to be about a body of water, the entry point to wishful thinking. Next thing Siahne knew, Hope was everywhere they looked. Comprised of a series of paintings on hand-hammered aluminium puddles and video documentation of their wishes, Siahne attempts to ask the question of what does it mean to enact the gesture of hopefulness in a world where there is very little hope left to have. Tossing the coin over and over, Siahne is still waiting for their wishes.
Exhibited in (HOPE)STALGIC Materialities and Wishful Horizons
2024
Curated by Egle Ambrasaite
Residency Unlimited NY USA
"Suspension of Disbelief!" (?) - Series of 3
Acrylic on Aluminium board.
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
In the RU House on Governors Island, Residency Unlimited opens a group exhibition (Hope)stalgic materialities and wishful horizons, presenting the works of six international artists who spent the last few months nurturing their artistic practices in New York City. They are: Mihael Klanjčić (Croatia), Anna Nemes (Hungary), Ivie Ada Onaiwu (Switzer- land), Siahne Rogers (Australia), Ai Sugiura (Japan), and Beyza Dilem Topdal (Turkey). This exhibition is curated by Eglė Ambrasaitė.
Scholarly works on nostalgia notice that the term should be addressed in a more nuanced way and proposes to embrace it as an affective reservoir (Odak, 2024)*. In this group exhibition, the featured artists reassess nostalgia as “an import- ant [...] aspect of the radical imagination” (Bonnett, 2010:1)* and embody it as a source of artistic and socio-politi-
cal perspective for a (wishful) future. Hence, (hope)stalgia here is grasped as “a mode of temporality, a cognitive and affective relation to time and a way to approach the relationships among historicity, presentism, and futurity” (Weeks 2011:186)*. For example, deep diving into poetics of wishful thinking according to critical affect theory, Siahne Rogers introduces us to their video work and new body of canvases that offer playful speculations on the process of making and coming-to-reality of our dreams. In a similar manner, by playing with the understanding of what is place-ness and what it means to be and to belong, in her photographic collage, Ai Sugiura, showcases a fantasy memoryscape, based on observing everyday locationalities of New York City’s sidewalks inscribed with various different titles and symbols. Cor- respondingly, Mihael Klanjčić works with the re-imagining of daily life objects’ time-scapes and in his sculptural instal- lation, addresses the (hope)stalgic materiality of one of New York city’s iconic symbols. In her current artistic practice, Anna Nemes gently builds around the drag community in Brooklyn and through her new video, sculptural and canvas pieces aims to expand the boundaries of drag through the lenses of post-humanist thought. Similarly, Beyza Dilem Topdal embraces post-humanist theories to study both past, present and future of non-human Turkish marine life en- tanglements. With the help of AI technologies, her immersive works portray a speculative ethnography for world-build- ing futuristic more-than-human kinships. Finally, Ivie Ada Onaiwu presents three large-scale textile-carpet-paintings offering us to see the carpets both as carriers of history and as a hopeful horizon for the possibility of feeling-at-home, being-safe-and-soft, and belonging.
*Bonnett, Alastair. 2010. Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Continuum.
*Odak, Petar. 2024. Forthcoming.
*Weeks, Kathi. 2020. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.
