Preview | The Protest and The Recuperation

What can be said for the radical aesthetics and the performativity, whether visual or gestural, that have become central to many progressive protests in recent years? The Protest and The Recuperation ponders that question with a survey of artistic perspectives on, and responses to, global protests that have taken place during the past decade from the Arab Spring through Covid-19, as well as the recuperative strategies of resistance.

This special preview of the forthcoming exhibition The Protest and The Recuperation includes an artist's video, a sculpture, and nine reproductions of works in the exhibition.

Khalid Albaih

Khalid Albaih (b. 1980, Bucharest; lives and works in Copenhagen) is a Romanian-born and Qatari-raised Sudanese creative producer who plans, designs, organizes, and manages artistic projects that have a cultural impact on the public. Through his political cartoons, Albaih depicts life in the Arab world and poses critical readings of social and political injustices. He publishes his cartoons on social media under the name “Khartoon,” a pun combining “cartoon” and “Khartoum,” Sudan’s capital.

Lara Baladi

Lara Baladi (b. 1969, Beirut; lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts) is an Egyptian-Lebanese multidisciplinary artist, archivist, and educator whose practice spans photography, video, sculpture, architecture, and multimedia installations. Informed by her critical investigations into historical archives and the study of popular culture iconography, her work questions the theoretical divide between fiction and reality and the cycles inherent to history. Under the umbrella Vox Populi, Baladi has amassed a significant archive of data on the 2011 Egyptian revolution and other global protest and social movements that has been the basis for media initiatives, art installations, and publications.

Sharon Chin

Sharon Chin (b. 1980, Petaling Jaya; active Fort Dickson, Malaysia) is an artist, curator, and community organizer. Integrating a variety of mediums, including drawing, performance, installation, sculpture, costume, and text, Chin creates work that is simultaneously political, performative, and personal.

Chow Chun Fai

Chow Chun Fai (b. 1980, Hong Kong; lives and works in Hong Kong) is a multimedia artist and political activist. His body of work features a wide range of mediums, including painting, video, and photographic installations.

Rachael Haynes

Rachael Haynes (b. 1977, Brisbane, Australia; lives and works in Brisbane) is an artist and educator whose practice and research engages with feminist archives, collective agency, and care ethics by examining the social and personal constructs of language and gender.

Sreshta Rit Premnath

Sreshta Rit Premnath (b. 1979, Bangalore; lives and works in Brooklyn) works across multiple media, investigating systems of representation and reflecting on the process by which images become icons and events become history.

Oliver Ressler

Oliver Ressler (b. 1970, Knittelfeld, Austria; lives and works in Vienna) is an artist and filmmaker who produces installations, projects in public spaces, and film works that address a wide range of contemporary socio-political issues spanning economics, democracy, migration, the climate crisis, and forms of anti-government resistance.

Josué Rivas

Josué Rivas (b. 1989, Turtle Island; lives and works in Portland, Oregon) is a Mexica and Otomi creative director, visual storyteller, and educator working at the intersection of art, journalism, technology, and social justice. As a self-described “Indigenous Futurist” he makes work that aims to challenge mainstream narratives about Indigenous peoples and serve as a vehicle for collective healing. He conceives his work as a co-creation with the community.

Hank Willis Thomas

Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976, Plainfield, NJ; lives and works in Brooklyn) is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture.

Eugenia Vargas-Pereira

Eugenia Vargas-Pereira (b. 1949, Chillán, Chile, lives and works in Tuscon and Santiago) is a photographer and performance artist whose work engages with organic materiality, the community, the female body against systems of dominance technology, and environmental degradation. Her transdisciplinary practice combines performance, photo-performance and photography, and installation and video, and focuses on issues of gender, natural environments, and mediated culture.