RESILIENCE, AN APTITUDE

IVÁN ARGOTE
YOUNES BABA-ALI
SHIRAZ BAYJOO
EIRENE EFSTATHIOU
MICHÈLE MAGEMA
CORINNE SILVA
YONAMINE

Curated by Cécile Bourne-Farrell

A day doesn’t go by without us speaking about the resilience of human beings in the face of injustice, climate change or migration. Resilience is what allows us to go beyond ourselves, to believe in justice and to go beyond the agreed and the conforming, the beautiful and the ugly.

Applied to any place or situation, resilience is the ability to face and absorb disturbances and constraints in micro and mega events in our lives. Human beings constantly need to adapt their functioning and their attitude when confronted with disturbances, in order to begin and manage the recovery process.

Artists face these challenges by anticipating them often with new propositions, shining a new light on the situation, allowing us to reflect, adapt and even change. Artists have the capacity to look differently at their peers and at the desperation with which certain human beings spend their lives fighting, crossing continents and seas, or rebuilding themselves in the face of loss and the need to exist.

This exhibition project addresses the capacity of resilience, which is present at the core of every human being and allows everyone to live in the present, to exceed it, as well as to share it. There are infinite ways to be resilient and each of the seven artists have their own way of sharing their aptitude to be resilient.

Iván Argote invites us to walk on words and Corinne Silva proposes to observe bullet impacts in the bark of trees in Sarajevo, while Eirene Efstathiou draws the way insurgents were hiding during the Greek civil war. Michèle Magema develops visual strategies to counter-act the damages of colonialism in Congo and Shiraz Bayjoo reveals to us haunted places in Mauritius. Still present today, savage capitalism is usurping natural sources as much as it is imposing its own values. Younes Baba-Ali and Yonamine operate on a poetic level to resist the alienation post-colonial countries are going through.