The Passion According to G.H.
Kostas Bassanos | Stephen Little | Hannah McKellar
curated by Joanne Makas
exhibition 07 – 24 March, 2019
opening on Wednesday 06 March 2019, 6 – 8pm
Art Month Art at Night, Thursday 21 March 2019, 6 – 8pm
The title of this exhibition, The passion according to G.H.,is taken from a mystical novel by Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, published in 1964. The narrator of the book is G.H., a Brazilian middle-class woman who sets out to clean a room in her house but finds herself exploring the very origins of human communication. As opposed to most literature, the narrator is not important as a human subject, but rather as a mode to express ideas that are beyond and above the human. Thus Lispector implies that G.H.’s perspective in the novel is not limited to her but is representative of the human species and its breakdown. There is a vulnerability to the way G.H. arrives at a new plane of being.
In a Kafkaesque encounter with a cockroach, G.H. finally understands what language is: “Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it – and the way I do not find it.”
The passion according to G.H. is an exhibition that investigates the politics of vulnerability through the role of language as a way to rethink notions of identity and place in the light of globalisation and post-colonialism. We live in a vulnerable world where everyone is vulnerable, no matter how much we try to avoid it. We unknowingly feel safe in our vulnerability. We also tend to associate the term vulnerability with scepticism, as a sign of weakness. Drawing on Judith Butler, vulnerability can instead be seen as form of activism, or as that which is in some sense mobilized in forms of resistance.[1]Vulnerability here is about being seen and made visible.
This exhibition presents counter-narratives as a way to reveal the malleability of language and its connection to knowledge and power. Importantly, the artists in this exhibition demonstrate the politics of vulnerability, and in doing so reveal old and new realities.
[1]Judith Butler, Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assemblage, (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: Harvard University Press, 2015), 123.
In a Kafkaesque encounter with a cockroach, G.H. finally understands what language is: “Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it – and the way I do not find it.”
The passion according to G.H. is an exhibition that investigates the politics of vulnerability through the role of language as a way to rethink notions of identity and place in the light of globalisation and post-colonialism. We live in a vulnerable world where everyone is vulnerable, no matter how much we try to avoid it. We unknowingly feel safe in our vulnerability. We also tend to associate the term vulnerability with scepticism, as a sign of weakness. Drawing on Judith Butler, vulnerability can instead be seen as form of activism, or as that which is in some sense mobilized in forms of resistance.[1]Vulnerability here is about being seen and made visible.
This exhibition presents counter-narratives as a way to reveal the malleability of language and its connection to knowledge and power. Importantly, the artists in this exhibition demonstrate the politics of vulnerability, and in doing so reveal old and new realities.
[1]Judith Butler, Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assemblage, (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: Harvard University Press, 2015), 123.
Images courtesy of the artists. Hannah McKellar's work photographed by Anthony Hodgkinson