SOVEREIGNTY REIMAGINED
“Sovereignty, many political philosophers argue, is an ‘ambiguous concept’; it is the foundation and source of authority, an instrument and argument in international relations, a legal entity, a technology, a normative code, an artifact, an expression of the popular will, the foundation of the modern state, a territorially defined entity with final decision-making power, and an extramoral and extra procedural pole”.
Ariella Azoulay
Opening: March 18th, 8-10:30PM
Gallery Hours: Sunday March 19th - Thursday March 23rd, 12pm - 4pm
Closing: March 24th, 8-10:30PM
Suggested Donation: $5 - $50
Working closely with New York based co-curator and moving image artist Alex Faoro, antiwarcoalition.art (The International Coalition of Cultural Workers in Solidarity with Ukraine) has organized this special exhibit dedicated to the investigation of sovereignty. After organizing more than twenty events throughout Europe since its inception in early 2022 during the outset of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the coalition now presents its first North American show devoted to a deep study of this destructive object.
Sovereignty Reimagined invites audiences to consider a series of urgent questions: What is sovereignty? What can be learned from deconstructing and reconfiguring this multifaceted and often contradictory term? And how can this process help us better understand its limitations and potentialities?
Sovereignty has been enshrined as a transcendental condition of contemporary politics, self-rule and ostensible peace-building efforts in the world. However, at the same time, it has also been invoked to justify war, colonialism, irredentism, statecraft and foreign intervention, and to vindicate subsequent dispossession and humanitarian crises. In many ways, it is an ideology that holds state conflict to be the primary and rightful agent of historical change. For these reasons, it seems imperative to problematize sovereignty; not as a general concept for virtuous autonomy –– that which is scarcely realized –– but rather as an amorphous legal, political and rhetorical code that ensnares vast populations in the thinly veiled cross-hairs of imperialism, patriarchy, authoritarianism, oppression, violence and coercion.
In her book, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Ariella Azoulay introduces the important distinction between Imperial Sovereignty - described above - and Worldly Sovereignty, “which refers to the persisting and repressed forms and formations of being in the world… [a practice] that consists of care of the common world in which one’s place among others is part of the world’s texture”. It is a process born out of compassionate and constructive world-building and life-affirming convictions which seek to actively unlearn the stratifying and destructive tendencies of Imperial Sovereignty; those which are deeply imbricated within normative global, political, social and historical structures.
Drawing inspiration from Azoulay’s elucidating text, this presentation of antiwarcoalition.art navigates the precarious threshold between these modes of being-in-the-world. Employing a wide variety of technical, conceptual and aesthetic approaches - including the use of photography, illustration, animation, graphic design, performance, found footage and personal materials - the participating artists engage in a collective process of analyzing, circumscribing, inverting and reimagining the many violent dynamics that constitute imperial sovereignty. Focusing on related subjects like trauma, interborder conflicts, demilitarization, ideological warfare, historical revisionism, stateless aspirations and the politics of memory (among other matters), the exhibit offers a critical and impassioned response to the problematic structures that continue to define and delimit our understanding of contemporary world events, their mediated relationship to the past, and their latent utopic potentialities for the future.
Curatorial group
Alex Faoro, Maxim Tyminko, Aleksander Komarov
Follow the link here to read an interview with the curators
Artists
Oksana Chepelyk /UA, Helena Deda & Alex Faoro /US, Daniil Galkin /UA, Uladzimir Hramovich And Lesia Pcholka /BY, Zhanna Kadyrova /UA, Anton Karyuk /UA, Dana Kavelina /UA, Daria Maiier & Emma Grünwald Hamzayeva (ÄSC3EA) /UA, Elturan Mammadov /AZ, Metasitu /GR, Vladimir Miladinovic /RS, Marina Naprushkina /DE, Valentyna Petrova /UA, Iaroslav Pobezhan /UA, Serhiy Popov /UA, Mykola Ridnyi /UA, Igor Sevcuk /NL
About the Organizer
Created in early 2022, in reaction to the war in Ukraine, The International Coalition of Cultural Workers in Solidarity with Ukraine was born out of an alliance between Belarusian and Ukrainian artists, curators and the Ambasada Kultury - a Belarusian organization in exile. The group operates as an open online platform that invites artists and curators to collaborate on public exhibitions, actions and discussions about the war in Ukraine and its global relevance. Most recently, they’ve shared their platform at Documenta 15, The Venice Biennial, The European Pavilion in Rome, and Manifesta Biennial in Kosovo. They are supported by a variety of organizations including the European Cultural Foundation, Cultural Institute of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, The Swedish Institute, Goethe Institute and the Human Rights House Foundation.
Alex Faoro is a librarian, researcher, curator and moving image artist. Utilizing personal and historiographical materials, his work explores memory and the mediating qualities of images. Beyond a keen curatorial interest, Alex Faoro has a personal investment in presenting this exhibit. His wife and close artistic collaborator Helena Deda - a writer and photographer from the Republic of Kosova - grew up during (and after) the final liberatory struggle of former Yugoslavia in the late 1990s. Drawing on her experiences, and their contemporary relevance, the duo creates penetrating works that address pervasive modern conditions like dispossession and refugeedom, and reflect their own universalist sensibilities.
Maenad Collective is composed of six artists whose combined work reveals alternative histories, resists heteronormativity and exposes systems of oppression.
Funds will be primarily donated to a refugee relief fund. A portion will be used to support the visiting curatorial team and the venue.
