“Traces of Utopia" is an exhibition curated by students and faculty participating in the long-term collaboration between AUB Art Galleries/FAAH, and the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts (HGB). The exchange, which is titled “Beyond Orientalism(s)," is funded by the German Academic Service Exchange (DAAD) and was initiated in order to facilitate critical discussion and exchange between students and faculty in the Art History and Curating program at AUB and the Culture of Curating program in Leipzig (HGB). The exhibition “Traces of Utopia," which constitutes Chapter One of this collaboration, was funded by CASAR (Center for American Studies and Research). The following Curatorial Statement was written by students enrolled in the spring semester curatorial courses AHIS-249K and AHIS-385A.
Traces of Utopia
AUB Byblos Bank Art Gallery
April 11–July 30, 2023
Download Exhibtion Publication (PDF)
Tell me a story of what you cannot tell
How strange it is to ask one of utopia. Where does such a question leave you?
Rage and Nightmares
Sudden rupture. Hesitating reflection. Impetuous transformation. Tentative exchange.
Night terrors have returned from my childhood, the deafening roars inside. Hypnotic renderings of the otherwise, of things not right, and of the hunger.
Something wider than the sky, carry it in my arms
The day doesn't hold much promise, we wrestle a new sensorial world. From spaces of disorder, a cloud of dust rises.
How does one begin to describe utopia? Larger than one's self, larger than the language of our fables. Does it leave hints in what yanks at us from the past or the not-yet begun? We only grasp the traces it leaves in the wake of our stories.
Barzakh
Where can these traces of utopia be located and felt and ingested? What closes off the potential for imagination? How can we perceive the in-between? Does the promise cut off movement elsewhere?
Natality
Looking at my hands, my body emerged before me. Only ever staring too close, it had always been blurry. I only catch glimpses in the mirror, through someone else's eyes. I create my body in my image.
Valleys of Thought
We can no longer simply work in arguments, dialogue or fixed utopias. Always in my dreams, beyond the present and visible, I hover slightly above the earth.
Eden
Children have more fun playing at someone else's home. What furnishes this space? How have the adults arranged it? Do the children even care? Will they come home?
It takes more than resolve to approach the beyond. Does it demand abandon or to hold tight?
Return [...]
Tables are set, rooms furnished, knick-knacks arranged, photographs set forth
sharing a meal; the sounds of a kitchen filled with working hands; the elation of the taste of a garden tomato; the mystery of a rising dough; the sight of a carefully dressed table; the heat of soft bread; the storytelling when plates are empty; the mess when dinner is over.
But the childhood dekkaneh you used to buy snacks from has closed. What remains of the street where you learned to drive is a crater. Someone else sits in your chair.
We have a compulsion to repeat. Flows of thought and emotion disperse and regenerate without prompting.
The Unsettling
Familiar understandings of reality are dislodged. A temporary annihilation, images appear, so different from what we have come to be familiar with. Are we not to look at it strangely, uncomfortable with the sense of something lost?
Under which rivers flow
The world comes alive below our being. Ceaseless transformation: is it possible we only ever notice in dire times?
Horizons. Expanses of blue, a promising threshold, ever-present and never there.
I wanted to channel you home, where you have never been.
The World is Not Yet Finished
Out emerges an autopoietic process driven by the imagining, laboring, creating and producing being driven on by their pains, their hunger and their dreams of overcoming that hunger.