& a pause, & a rose

Curated by Olakiitan Adeola

Artists: Lyn Hejinian, Dina Kelberman, Michelle Angwenyi, Dulce Lamarca, Alyssa Freitas, Maho Donowaki

November 2019

& a pause, & a rose is a language-driven exhibition that explores its site as a space for poetic instants.

Set against an existing divide between hermeneutics and an erotics of the art, & a pause, & a rose questions this divide by opening to the various possibilities afforded in the fusion between these modes of encountering other things and encountering ourselves. Chances and portals to pleasure are numerous; yet for so long, we reach habitually to familiar, repetitive rituals—framed to receive commodified offerings. But consider other modes: in that thrilling way of serendipity, what is it to feel tingles in between lines of communicative codes? To see a flash of another world within this one? 

Taking the idea of a “poetic instant,” the exhibition features textual, visual, aural and performative forms of language that place its site within poetic and prosaic temporalities gifting individually customed pleasurescapes. As language is a malleable form in itself, Lyn Hejinian and Michelle Angwenyi’s poetry frame memories imbuing images and time warps. Alyssa Freitas’s video installation follows a short fragmented stream of an online user’s consciousness grappling with the need to communicate outside of their own bubble. In Dulce Lamarca and Dina Kelberman’s video work, the looping of mundane human activities requires a gesture of attention. Maho Donowaki’s autobiographical performance invites the viewers to participate in making a sculptural narrative and find their own entry points through interpretation.

& a pause, & a rose as an artificial cosmos situates itself at a point where we can encounter fleeting or lasting time within the poetic pulses of the artworks. At the end, it is a reminder that these fluxes abound in and outside the exhibition: that pause, the rose, the euphoria of small moments, and the instant when the world gives way.