Installation view, works by Citra Sasmita at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo – choreographies of the impossible © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.
A new enlightenment is sweeping through that sub-class of the bourgeoisie that is the contemporary art world. You may have heard of it. It is a way of thinking comprising not isms but alities: materiality, temporality, corporeality, sensorality, spirituality. It is distrustful of representation, but fixed firmly in identity, specifically that of the oppressed. It sees time not as progressive or even linear, but helical. It understands that the world is marked by histories of colonial and patriarchal violence, but it does not want to trade in violent imagery. Instead, it lingers in absence, erasure and lack. The syllabus is that of the Black North American intellectuals writing lyrically about the “terrible beauty” of the transatlantic diaspora: Saidiyah Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Dionne Brand. Its politics are not organised around the 19th century pursuit of “freedom” and “liberty,” nor the “liberation” and “solidarity” of the 20th. “Justice” and “transformation,” the refrain of our parents’ generation, is similarly eschewed. “Decolonisation,” a word we picked up when we were students, has also been discarded. Instead, this is a politics of “collectivity” and “collaboration.” Indeed, it falls more in the camp of ethics and epistemology than in the realm of politics, traditionally understood. If it is a politics, it is a politics not of movements but gestures. If it is a revolution, it is a revolution happening on the level of poetics. A revolution of discourse, affect and minor acts of resistance. It is this enlightenment that is guiding the various collectives of curators (and they are almost always collectives) that I met over the course of one week in São Paulo on the occasion of choreographies of the impossible, the 35th edition of the São Paulo Bienal.
Onto the second floor, where Adams’ lungs pump. Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied (1989) is the heart pulsating with as much anger as there is water in the body, to paraphrase a line from the film. A blood-red painted room contains Citra Sasmita’s Timur Mirah Project IX: Beyond the Realm of Senses (Oracle and Demons), which is all about the arteries and veins that connect tree to woman to snake to hair to sun to skin.
