as we become
as we become looks at the notions around a conceptual practice and its placement within the frameworks of different, temporal political conditions. How do we understand Trump's walls being pushed into popular imagination as a "conceptual practice" or Anish Kapoor's 'Bean' sculpture being co-opted by the National Rifles Association (NRA). How do we think through the aspect of seeing - of how memory, pasts, presents and futures of an image coalesce, get co-opted and how might we maneuver through that as cultural producers. And as a viewer/ participant/ audience, how would someone who engages with the work produce a certain kind of interpretation that leads to a new set of 'referents' outside of known iconographies, symbols and myths.
The show is an attempt at a set of relations, of juxtapositions, with an intention. 'These intentions are articulated by Annett Busch in her reading of Akomfrah's essay-films as ones that "create a refusal of producing certain knowledge." In thinking of a moving away from neoliberal, late capitalistic conditions, that demand an "artwork" to be an illustration of a certain "concept" (co-opted and otherwise), what one encounters in the show is a disconcerting portal to be entered; a seductive Deluzian operation. But disconcerting portals, ones that seem all too obvious and 'overdone', could be a first proposition for thinking beyond - as a possibility for something new to emerge from within late capitalism's 'cramped spaces' of articulation and being. New strategies might allow for a shift from what Ernest Bloch describes as 'contemplative knowledge' to a 'theory-practice'. This might deny say, an imagery of 'activism', of 'identitarian politics' and produce instead "a reading that has to be invented and contains its own fiction." How do we think through the co-options of the 'minoritarians' that occur today and how do we recognize and place this in current political urgencies and conditions, knowing well that any or many moments of 'recognition' are already biased, already corrupted, already co-opted.
