"How to Reverse a Spell is the second iteration of the project entitled Venus in III Acts, inspired by Saidiya Hartman's 1998 essay, addressing how contemporary artists explore, expand, challenge and disrupt the objectivity and subjectivity of the archive and the legacies that make up their existences. Returning to Hartman's central question in the essay – how can we conjure something new from absences and erasures of the grand narratives? - the exhibition brings together six African and diasporic artists who actively seek to transcend the limits of what is possible concerning their mediums.

Departing from the premise that archives are living things whose construction is an ongoing, never-completed project, the exhibition features the work of Euridice Zaituna Kala, Iris Chocolate, Januario Jano, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Sofia Yala, Yasmine Benebdallah, who through diverse visual, sonic and gestural technologies unlock possibilities of form, language, speculation and intellectual inquiry. Through their practices, each artist proposes expanded understandings of archives, of the tense dispute between past and present, the ambivalences and nuances in the way they both create new archives and define their subjectivities not determined by colonial modes of representation."

PAULA NASCIMENTO

Excerpt of the exhibition text