Optimism and its afterlives

Jane Zusters, Matthew Galloway, Naeem Mohaiemen, Selina Ershadi
curated by Simon Gennard

Optimism and its afterlives think around a series of transitional moments, including works by artists who have found themselves, witness, to or bound up in scenes of change. Featuring newly commissioned projects by Matthew Galloway and Selina Ershadi, alongside works by Jane Zusters and Naeem Mohaiemen, Optimism and its afterlives proposes that art has the capacity to allow us to linger with the surprise, disarray, bafflement and hope of best-laid plans and unmet expectations. More a call to attention than a call to arms, the exhibition asks how art might aid us to maintain a desire for worlds to come, and how it might enable us to weather what feels intractable, immovable or overwhelming.

Spanning registers that are at once urgent, lyrical and searching, Optimism and its afterlives map disparate temporal and geographic terrains—from a dam on the Mata-au Clutha River in Otago to the environmentalist scene in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in the 1980s, to that same city as it appears today, to an airport tarmac in 1970s Dhaka. The works gathered here occupy what Rebecca Solnit calls the “spaciousness of uncertainty,” to speculate on what—whether a matter of continuity or transformation—might be made from there. (1)

Optimism and its afterlives are accompanied by a reader designed by Matthew Galloway, including new writing from Manon Revuelta.

Image: Matthew Galloway, Research image, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.

(1) Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the dark: Untold histories, wild possibilities (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2016), xii.