What Hope Looks Like After Hope (On Constructive Alienation): Curated by Bassam El Baroni

Bassam El Baroni is an independent curator and a professor of theory at the Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem. He has curated and co-curated projects and exhibitions for Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010); Lofoten International Art Festival, Lotofen (2013); Eva International – Irish Biennial, Limerick (2014); as well as exhibitions in Madrid, Oslo, Bergen, Paris, and Alexandria. He was co-founder and director of the former art space, the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (2005-2012).



What would hope look like if we injected it with a strenuous dose of reality, placed it in a world where causes are untraceable and effects incalculable, severed it from its more eschatological concerns about the future, and blocked it from using the posturing of human rights and humanism?



What Hope Looks like After Hope takes the form of an exhibition and a series of related talks and presentations by artists and invited guest speakers through which the aesthetics and politics of Constructive Alienation are presented and discussed from a wide perspective. Developed in dialogue with the participants, What Hope Looks like After Hope focuses on presenting newly commissioned and already existing works by artists whose practice relates to the notion of Constructive Alienation. It also revisits the work of artists from recent art history, speculating on their possible aesthetico-political engagement in a project on inverted hope. Finally, through talks and presentations it aims to initiate discussion and debate on the place of art in a contemporary constructive politics.



Hicham Awad is a PhD student in film and visual studies at Harvard University. He explores audiovisual configurations of space and movement produced by scientific, military, and cinematic technologies of capture and simulation, and is invested in drawing out the historical, ideological, and politico-economic connections between capitalism and cinema. Awad completed an MA in aural and visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2011. He has presented papers and talks at the Graduate Center at City University of New York, the University of Chicago, as well as Beirut Art Center and Ashkal Alwan in Lebanon.



Katia Barrett is an artist based in London, currently completing an MA at the Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem. Her recent research and practice draws upon developments in interdisciplinary theoretical biology in which the subjectivisation of nature corresponds with a naturalisation of subjectivity. From this theoretical platform, she explores questions of agency, reason, consciousness and will. Her recent shows include Young London, V22, London (2013) and Geology of Piss, Xero, Kline & Coma, London (2012).



Amanda Beech is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Her work explores a new realist approach to the image, contingency, and the political through force. Recent solo shows include All Obstructing Walls Have Been Broken Down, Catalyst Arts, Belfast (2014); and Final Machine, Lanchester Gallery Projects, UK (2013). She has recently presented work in Agitationism, Irish Biennial; L’Avenir, Montreal Biennale (2014); and Speculative Aesthetics, Tate Britain (2015). Beech’s writing includes essays for Speculative Aesthetics, (Urbanomic 2014); Realism, Materialism, Art (Sternberg Press 2015), and catalogue contributions for the Irish and Montreal biennales. Her books include Final Machine (2013) and Sanity Assassin (2010), published by Urbanomic. Beech is dean of critical studies at CalArts, California.



Leonardo Cremonini was an Italian painter. He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna. At the age of twenty-six, Cremonini obtained a grant that allowed him to travel to Paris, where he settled and later taught at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Painting a world elevated from its daily reference points by extracting their essence, Cremonini’s paintings of indoor and outdoor scenes are known for their enigmatic and distanced quality. Retrospective exhibitions of his work have been held in Basel, Brussels, Metz, Paris, Prague, Siena, Strasbourg, Spoleto, and Tokyo.



Martti Kalliala is an architect based between Berlin and Helsinki. He works across design, research, and curating with a focus on the intersection of technology, social innovation, and built form.



Yuri Pattison is an artist based in London. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Helga Maria Klosterfelde, Berlin (2015); Cell Projects, London (2014); and Arcadia Missa, London (2012), among others. His work has also been shown at Kunsthalle Wien, Austria; Tate Britain, London; ICA, London; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland; Seventeen Gallery, London; and Outpost, Norwich. Pattison is the recipient of the Chisenhale Gallery Create Residency (2014-2016).



Nelmarie du Preez is a South African artist based between Pretoria and London, working in the fields of performance, photography, video, and computational arts. She recently completed her MFA in fine art at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she also completed an MA in computational arts in 2013. She has exhibited in London, New York, Buenos Aires, and Berlin, as well as major cities in South Africa. She recently won the Sasol New Signatures competition and is the 2015 Ampersand Foundation Fellow. Du Preez is currently a lecturer in visual arts and new media at the University of South Africa.



Matthew Poole is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles. He is chair of the Department of Art at California State University San Bernardino, and was previously program director of the Centre for Curatorial Studies at the University of Essex, UK. He has produced exhibitions internationally, and his most recent written project, a collaboration with architect and theorist Manual Shvartzberg, published by Bloomsbury Academic in November 2015, is entitled The Politics of Parametricism: Digital Technologies in Architecture.



Patricia Reed is an artist and writer based in Berlin. She has exhibited at the Witte de With, Netherlands; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Germany; Kunsthaus Langenthal, Switzerland; and the Württembergische Kunstverein, Germany. Reed’s texts have been published in #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader; The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Vol. II; Intangible Economies; Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics; and Fillip. She has given lectures at the ICA, London; IMA, Australia; the Montréal Biennale, Canada; Tate Britain, London; Artists Space, USA; and MIT, USA, among others. Reed hosts the Inclinations lecture series in Berlin and is part of the Laboria Cuboniks working group.



Brian William Rogers is an artist, performer, musician, and writer. His work has been exhibited and published internationally.



Yasmine Dubois Ziai is a Warp recording artist and performer. Her work has been shown at MOCA and MoMA, USA.



Walid Sadek’s early work investigates the familial legacies of the Lebanese civil war and the complexity of lingering civil strife. His later work proposes a theory for a post-war society disinclined to resume normative living. More recently, his work is concerned with the logic of a protracted civil war and searches for a critical temporality to challenge that same protractedness. Sadek is associate professor in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut.



Mohammad Salemy is an independent New York-based artist, critic, and curator. His writings have been published in e-flux, Flash Art, Third Rail, and Brooklyn Rail. He has curated exhibitions at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Access Gallery, and Satellite Gallery in Vancouver. In 2014, he organized the Incredible Machines conference. Salemy holds an MA in critical curatorial studies from the University of British Columbia and is one of the organizers of The New Centre for Research & Practice.

Untitled is a video combining still and moving images as well as sound/music extracted from films with a series of short texts examining the relationship between cinema and thought as it has been developed in film theory, philosophy, and cinema itself. Departing from Gilles Deleuze’s inquiry into the “problem” of thought, in his 1989 book Cinema 2: The Time-Image, this work uses cinematic montage in order to discern why thought, as opposed to reason, has been the subject of film-theoretical inquiry. Thinking with and against Deleuze, Untitled is an exercise in assembling connections over time and across a body of cinematic works in order to extract patterns of thought and modalities of reason from within the rich history of cinema. Untitled was specially commissioned for HW7.



Limiting Metaphors, Enabling Constraint takes the form of a fictional courtroom drama. Using the transcripts from an existing case, it re-imagines the plot: this time not driven by retelling the events of the night of the incident, but instead by attempting to base its formulation of power on an understanding of agency determined by neurobiological operations and cognitive science. In this courtroom scenario, the lawyer - as a situated individual in conjunction with the universality of the law - becomes the agent to explore the potential exploitation of this model of subjectivity that is understood as always in-between and only in relation to its environment. Limiting Metaphors, Enabling Constraint was specially commissioned for HW7.



Covenant Transport, Move or Die is a multi channel video installation that explores and transcends the contemporary idealization of mobility as an alibi for the dominance of neoliberal power. Mixing scientific style inquiry, old skool gaming and game show aesthetics, it features five characters - a worker, programmer, consumer, and dealer- that occupy the site of a wasteland. They wade through the terrain of global capitalist power from the perspective of a collective psychology that annihilates the political stagnation of technology, industry and the mire of our present imaginary. Covenant Transport, Move or Die is premiering at HW7.



Presented here are not original Cremonini works, but rather a selection of printed scans of paintings by the late Italian artist (1925 – 2010). Cremonini's enigmatic indoor and outdoor scenes attracted significant critical attention and were the subject of over fifty critical texts by leading intellectuals. Notably, his work was celebrated by Louis Althusser in a 1966 essay titled Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract. If all that Cremonini ‘paints’ about ‘man’ is his reality: the ‘abstract’ relations which constitute him in his being, which make even his individuality and freedom – it is because he also knows that every painted work is only painted to be seen, and to be seen by living ‘concrete’ men, capable of determining themselves practically, within objective limits, determined, in their freedom, by the very ‘sight’ of what they are. Cremonini thus follows the path which was opened up to men by the great revolutionary thinkers who understood that freedom of men is not achieved by the complacency of its ideological recognition, but by knowledge of the laws of their slavery, and that the ‘realization’ of their concrete individuality is achieved by the analysis and mastery of the abstract relations which govern them. - Louis Althusser



The works will be hung in a hotel room setting along with Yuri Pattison’s video 1014, shot in Edward Snowden’s hotel room hideout.  ExoStead is a scenographic architectural installation depicting a seastead. Seasteads have been defined as sovereign spaces constructed in the high seas outside of state jurisdiction. ExoStead is a diminutive synthetic paradise in the form of a hanging aquatic garden on a cascading stack of platforms. It weaves together several key themes of Kalliala’s work: the rendering in space of different forms of exit and the concepts of the island, platform and stack embodied in architectural form. This composite weaving aims to elucidate the concept of “exitcore” central to Kalliala’s work. “Exitcore” is the apparent contemporary aesthetic limit of utopia. ExoStead was specially commissioned for HW7.



to stab and to rely are two works from Loops of Relation, a series of documented performances that du Preez describes as “trust exercises”. For these video works the artist established a collective entity ‘Du Preez/Gui’ between herself and her computer. The actants in this entity stand as equals in a performance-based artistic collaboration. The works ask how a human-computer relationship might be useful in revealing questions relating to “the self” as constituted by “the other.”



1014 guides us through the specific hotel room where Edward Snowden stayed while in Hong Kong following his departure from the US. It is the location of many of the interviews seen in the film CitizenFour in addition to the breakthrough Guardian interview that first revealed his identity to the world as the source of the NSA surveillance leaks. By looking back at this location, 1014 meditates on recent history after the Academy Award win for CitizenFour, reflecting on the rapid transition of the story from political crisis to entertainment without any significant changes to the political status quo. Somewhere between a review of an anonymous hotel room and a pilgrimage to a famous movie location, 1014 draws the arc of this transition.  Société Phantome is a montage of one hundred images of works by Bodys Isek Kingelez (1948 – 2015) projected as 35mm slides alongside a digital projection of a poem written by Matthew Poole, also titled Société Phantome. The piece is a collaboration between curator Bassam El Baroni and Poole. Prompted by Kingelez’s most well-known work, Ville Fantôme (1995-1996), the imagery for this work passes around already existing photographs of Kingelez’s baroque architectural models, some at close range, others at a distance, inspecting the vistas and perspectives, the forms and the pathways, as well as the pixels and the moiré patterns of the photographs. The accompanying poem is structured as a set of instructions, or checklist, for a building or design project, and can be imagined sung whilst working or building.



Financial engineers are our contemporary soothsayers and Volatile Prophesies is a new installation deploying some of their techniques. Becoming increasingly abstract, our current economy is epitomized by the derivative function, where the usual idea of cause preceding effect is upended by the derivative. This is a new semio-economic structure that operates like language: a word is disjointed from its referent and can reference itself ad infinitum. Such - rather fictional - structures generate very real consequences and phenomena that shape social possibilities from within. Volatile Prophesies uses projections of text and image to compose an experiment in rendering perceptible this semio-economic condition; opening up a space to question how these volatilities may be exploited for other ends.



Dormant Assets is a radiophonic performance that dramatizes a world after what writer Suhail Malik describes as our contemporary financialized “risk relations.” The piece is staged atop a sculpture designed by architect Martti Kalliala. This platform – comprised of bespoke textile prints, botanical designs, and multichannel sound – is cast as a future hanging garden, a synthetic Eden founded by a small group of individuals atop an abandoned oil rig. The performers in Dormant Assets recite a script detailing their characters’ experiences both as members of a future paramilitary task force charged with identifying individuals as potential dormant political assets, and as a married couple reconciling the changes a post-scarcity, post-precarity society has catalyzed in domestic life. Inspired by sources as diverse as Bertholt Brecht, Catherine Christer Hennix, Michel Chion, François Bayle, and the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, Dormant Assets looks to the sea for signs that notionally identify the possible shapes social bonds could assume in the future.



This installation sets up a visual apparatus to propose that the Open is born of a double indexicality. Like the appearance of a third spectral dimension in stereoscopic photography, the Open also calls for a making. It is important to make the distinction between Parthenopoeisis - which means the making virgin - and the more accepted concept of parthenogenesis which means virgin birth. Parthenopoeisis is a term Sadek proposes even if, as far as he can tell, it is not allowed in Latin. This term is a neologism that the artist uses to envision the conditions for an openness to an existence in which living is possible without the promise of an impending eruptive event. This installation is indebted to the pictorial compositional openness formed by the extended arms of the prostrate man and legs of the horse in Caravaggio’s The Conversion of St. Paul. The Artist Is Hyperpresent is an installation consisting of a group of CPUs, screens, and various other computational and photographic accessories, which together provide the technological infrastructure for the streaming of Mohammad Salemy’s wireless social media presence into the exhibition space as an object with distinct formal qualities. With an incoming stream of data in real-time, the sculpture abstracts and represents the artist as he functions on various social media platforms for the purpose of and in relation to this exhibition