Date: Thursday 13 June 2024

Time: 4.30pm

Place: Dalloul Art Foundation

Language: English

Duration: 1h30



Registration: (78) 959670 ; visites@agendaculturel.com

The visit is free of charge - Booking is required.

Number of participants is limited.

The visit will be guided by Wafa Roz, director of the Dalloul Art Foundation.

Hope in an Age of Dystopia exhibition presents a selection from the Dalloul Art Foundation’s recent acquisitions. Across this collection, the pieces speak to each other as they tread the fine line between despair and hope. Many of the artworks are vibrant in their form yet often bleak in their content. Some works critique our current social condition with sharp wit, while others playfully invite us to join in on the joke. Yet, they all engage with a dystopian reality characterized by our inability to escape the confines of various systems of control. However, as is common within the dystopian genre, the ultimate motive is not to despair, but to imagine different paths for a better future.

A dystopia is an imagined world, often taking place in the future, where people live in some form of an unjust or oppressive society. Many of us currently feel as though we are living in a dystopian reality because we are experiencing the lack of balance in power throughout our lives. This exhibition reflects upon and considers a multitude of domains through which power is exercised today: global capitalist economies and environmental degradation, tech industries and corporate power, laws and regulations, military complexes, and surveillance apparatuses (among many others). These domains of power structure people's daily realities, including their grievances, wants, needs, and feelings. They also perpetuate processes of labor exploitation and resource extraction from underdeveloped countries—all in the service of advanced economies, imperialist interests, and global capital accumulation.

Dystopian stories or representations are never a celebration of destruction and injustice, despite primarily reflecting these aspects. Although many of the works reflect themes of dystopia, they do so in conjunction with a sense of diffident hope. Hope in an Age of Dystopia is fundamentally an invitation to imagine a different mode of resistance. It does not ask the viewer to ignore reality, it asks them not to fall into nihilistic despondency. There is a profound sense of vulnerability throughout the artworks and the materials used: delicate and intricate stitching of a harrowing reality, dazzling embroidery of nature overcoming, rusty and repurposed metal molded into expression, bright neon witticisms, and concrete futurisms. Every single piece acknowledges a fundamental truth: that intimacy, connection, and communication are the way our hopes can come to fruition.

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Les visites guidées de l’Agenda Culturel sont organisées avec le support de Artscoops