Program partnerships between Liquid Architecture (Naarm/Melbourne) and Sarai (New Delhi)

[Laura McLean]

Dear AN4AA community,

I hope this finds you all well. Before it closes this Sunday, I warmly invite those of you in Melbourne to catch The place we do not know is the place we are looking for, an exhibition developed by Liquid Architecture (Naarm/Melbourne) and Sarai (New Delhi) and presented at West Space in Collingwood Yards (details below).

For those here and elsewhere, you can also revisit the accompanying public program Recompositions, with discussions and performance lectures by artists from across Australia and South Asia now published on West Space's Offsite platform.

Also just launched by Liquid Architecture and Sarai is the Capture All website, which documents a multiyear collaboration between the two organisations considering Australia and India’s complex relationships to data colonialism and extraction across physical and digital spaces, featuring artists, scholars, and writers contributing to a series of critical intensives and dialogues, publications, and public programs.

Kind regards,

Laura

The place we do not know is the place we are looking for is composed of an exhibition and discursive program developed by Liquid Architecture (Naarm/Melbourne) and Sarai-CSDS (Delhi, India) and presented at West Space. The exhibition brings together artists from across Australia and South Asia exploring the techniques and tools we use to pin down and understand our world.

The place we do not know is the place we are looking for interrogates modernity’s relationship with calculability, quantifiability, and causality, attuning to excesses that cannot be rationally explained by the scientific measurement and technological systems. Here, the artists consider limits, fragility, porosities, and what it means to speak in languages that poke holes in a world preoccupied with capture, control, and determinacy.

This project takes its title from an essay by philosopher and activist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi that calls out to us, here and now:

This place we don’t know is the place we are looking for, in a social environment that has been impoverished by social precariousness, in a landscape that has been desertified. It is the place that will be able to warm the sensible sphere that has been deprived of the joy of singularity. It is the place of occupation, where movements are gathering…

Taking this proposition and Bifo’s notions of the poetic as departure points, the curatorial framework engages with practices that foreground and reactivate sites of erasure and closure, alienation and automation. These sites become scenes to be tenaciously reconfigured by the artists as potential grounds for the emergence of new poetics and relationalities.

Curated by Laura McLean and Suvani Suri.

Featuring artists: Priyanka Chhabra, Fileona Dkhar, Merve Ertufan & Mochu, Merv Espina, Uzma Falak, Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker, Alana Hunt, Shareeka Helaluddin, Aarti Jadu & Claire de Carteret, Rahee Punyashloka, Hayden Ryan, Thomas Smith, Joel Sherwood Spring, Aarti Sunder.

Presented across West Space (1 Feb → 29 March) and Liquid Architecture (1 → 22 Feb) by West Space, Liquid Architecture and Sarai-CSDS, supported by the Centre for Australia-India Relations Maitri Cultural Partnerships Program.

(Image credit: Priyanka Chhabra, Iqraar-naama (The Agreement), 2022, still from film)

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Laura McLean

+61 (0)479 185 766 (Aus & WhatsApp)

Artistic Director, Blindside

Associate Curator, Liquid Architecture

Teaching Associate, MADA, Monash University

PhD researcher in Curatorial Practice, MADA, Monash University

Member, ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making + Society

ARCH India research spotlight & profile

I pay my respect to the Traditional Custodians of the Kulin Nation, on whose lands I live and work.