KADIST invites Mónica de Miranda and Bruno Leitão, founders and directors of Hangar, an artistic research center located in Graça, Lisbon, for an art-space residency and exhibition.

Developed over three chapters, the exhibition Affective Utopia will approach questions and challenges relative to the production of knowledge in the arts and curatorial practices: a reflection on the tensions and conflicts generated by South/North issues, geographic divisions, cultural assimilation and the urgent need for decolonization of thought in curatorial processes and artistic production.

The artists in this exhibition discuss the different ways of thinking and performing utopia in contemporary art from a broad range of angles. The concept of utopia entails two related but contradictory perceptions: the aspiration to a better world, and the acknowledgement that its form may only ever live in our imaginations through the artists’ fictional reconstructions of reality. Affective Utopia reflects this general ambivalence, but it also poses the question of how art can be a tool for critical reflection of one’s own socialization process and to one´s connections to affective geographic concepts of belonging, origin and diaspora.

The purpose of the art-space residency is to experiment with delocalizing context relevant practices in order to offer new perspectives on discussions happening in Paris, and internationally.

Hangar in Lisbon produces exhibitions as spaces of action for public engagement beyond spectatorship and through strategies that produce sociality. Delocalized at KADIST during the time of this exhibition, Bruno Leitão and Mónica de Miranda’s project will reframe this approach towards public engagement in another context and towards another audience.

*The artists in the exhibition have all worked with Hangar in Lisbon through residencies, talks or exhibitions.

The chapters:

1 — Concrete Utopia

09.02 — 03.03
With Sammy Baloji & Filip De Boeck, Ângela Ferreira, Kiluanji Kia Henda

2 —Art as a Critical Tool

07.03 — 24.03
With Luis Camnitzer, Alfredo Jaar, Reynier Leyva Novo

3 —The Body as a Political Tool

04.04 — 21.04
Com Grada Kilomba and Paulo Nazareth

Os eventos (às 19:00 no escritório da KADIST, Paris):

26.02
Talk by Sammy Baloji & Filip De Boeck

07.03
Talk by Luis Camnitzer

12.04
Grada Kilomba in conversation with Paul Goodwin