On Anti-Colonial Gestures and Their Trajectories

What do artists hope to recall or achieve when they invoke colonial, imperial, and capitalist histories? When diving into these legacies, does aesthetic absorption have to give way to the informative and the didactic? What are our views on art that appears to politicize itself while upholding accepted aesthetic interests? These are questions whose answers we, as audiences of contemporary art, have attempted to approximate many times.

The panel discussion will be joined by one of the exhibiting artists, Lucas Odahara, along with Laurie Rojas, Justin Polera and Jacob Zhicheng Zhang. It will look at the exhibition Atlas of Affinities: Vol. 1, the Far-Near, for partial answers to such questions above and, more importantly, moments that prompt critical evaluation. In the meantime, by discussing Odahara’s work Os Desorietes da Pantera (2021) on view at the gallery, we hope to trace the trajectory behind the piece: from colonial rubber cultivation to the 80s/90s ball culture in Brazil and a performance activating the work by the interdisciplinary collective CFGNY in 2021 in Berlin.