| “I know because I’m an intellectual who tries to follow everything that happens, to imagine everything that is unknown or unspoken, who connects facts that may seem disparate, that puts together the disorganized and fragmentary pieces of an entire coherent picture, who restores logic where arbitrariness, folly, and mystery seem to rule.” — Pier Paolo Pasolini
Feral File and synthesis gallery are pleased to announce I Know, an exhibition exploring what an aesthetic of truth might be. Curated by Giorgio Vitale, I Know features an intergenerational group of five artists, aaajiao, AES+F, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Claudia Hart and Yehwan Song, each embracing very different aesthetics and artistic strategies. Their works in the show address anxieties about the turmoil we are now experiencing around the world and offer critical reflections on it.
The “truth” considered in this exhibition is not a scientific or academic one, but rather an imaginative one. It is based on the slow unfolding that viewers experience when they sit with an artwork. In our current post-truth society, in which veracity and accuracy are sacrificed on the altar of hyperbole and misinformation, I Know invites artists to reexamine historical moments and to evoke images of the past in order to claim a place within it. These artists struggle with power, inequality, and discrimination, addressing debates about mass surveillance and the architecture of the web3. The works in the exhibition reflect on traditional modes of thinking, both inside of and outside of the arts, and in so doing make way for future possibilities.
I Know embraces oddities. It speaks loudly, without saying a word. It is paradoxical and incomprehensible. It requires interpretation. It calls for philosophical answers. The title of the exhibition is inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1974 j’accuse ‘Io So’ (“I know” in Italian), which became the symbol of a generation in Italy: a hymn to intellectual freedom and the importance of the civil role played by artists and intellectuals in questioning the status quo and resisting silence and connivance by embracing folly and the absurd.
I Know is a brutal liberation. No less. |
