Grains of Sand Like Mountains

2024

Co-curation
at Kunsthal, Gent

Artists: Noor Abed, Disarming Design, Alice Diop, Nina Jayasuriya, Seppe-Hazel Laeremans, Seulgi Lee, Renée Lorie, Micheline Nahra, Ben de Raes, Hussein Shikha, Stef Van Looveren

Special thanks to Laura Herman, Valentijn Goethals, Isabel Van Bos, Sonia D’Alto, Marijke Van Eeckhaut, Galerie Jousse Entreprise, argos centre for audiovisual arts, Totem Films, Kunsthal Gent Team, Design Museum Gent, S.M.A.K., Ghent University, KASK & Conservatorium.

Views by Michiel De Cleene

Grains of Sand Like Mountains is a group exhibition and a public programme curated by the Curatorial Studies class of 2023 – 2024.

Taking our own experiences in curating this show together as a starting point, we raise questions about how multiple ‘I’s’ can work, live, belong and organise as an ‘us’. Collectivity, however, is multi-layered and complex; it can manifest as celebration, play, debate, assembly but also refusal.

The exhibition unfolds through a constellation of works including video, sculpture, photography, and performance, exploring how we can live together. It invites viewers to co-contemplate the transformation from ‘I’ to ‘us’ within diverse societal contexts. These manifestations of collectivity take various forms, from the forced gathering of undocumented workers in Brussels, as witnessed by Ben de Raes in Waiting Working Hours (2019), to the elusive orality of folk culture in Brittany portrayed through Seulgi Lee’s video ÎLES AUX FEMMES (2019).

Grains of Sand Like Mountains is approached as an archipelago, allowing the encounter of collective practices within intersecting cultures. This is made tangible in the ceremonial gathering within the Palestinian community depicted in the video work Out of Joint (2018) by Noor Abed, as well as in Micheline Nahra’s sculptural work A Dinner for One (2019) in which she portrays the lasting effects of war, displacement, and solitude in Lebanon. Furthermore, alternative perspectives on the discourse surrounding shared and mixed-up heritages are explored by Nina Jayasuriya in magē gear magē pansala (2023) and Hussein Shikha looks into the symbolism and history of motifs within Southern Iraqi carpet traditions in his video installation GARDEN_OF_EDEN.ISO (2023). Finally, while touching on the notions of gender, genderlessness and personas, Stef Van Loveren’s film Radical Hope (2018) looks into different stages of life, all linked to emotions of sadness, anger, desire, happiness, resentment and terror, where at the end, individuals merge into one.