Curatorial Statement

At a time defined by fast paced changes in our world, manifesting environmentally, technologically, economically and politically, we look at our present with a double gaze. We look back into our past thinking of the genealogy of how we are here now, how we ended in crisis or in technical triumph. And we look into the future, thinking of where we could go next, a colonized Mars or a more equitable inhabitable Earth. A moment defined by anxiety, speculation, reinvention and restructuring.

While not thematically curated, the exhibition explores multiple intersecting questions, on representation of nature in the arts, the future of the human body in the age of AI and the blockchain, memory in relation to ancestry, and hidden digital genealogies. The exhibition was developed in close collaboration with the invited artists, through durational conversations, collaborations, and creative research.

The exhibition is entitled Arqaam. Arqaam (meaning digits, or numbers in Arabic), evokes forgotten histories of shared knowledge practices, accumulated through migration and cohabitation. It evokes the memory of North African, Indian and Persian contributions to mathematics, centuries ago. It reminds us of cognitive injustices and singular narratives that define artistic discourses today, that oftentimes exclude non-western aesthetics and narratives. While we continue to use Arabic numerals for everything from paying a bill to building the blockchain, our contemporary world is distant from that history of knowledge sharing and cohabitation. The playful title ‘Arqaam’ is not trying to rewrite the present through an imagined past, and it does not aim to build a nostalgic frame over our reality today. It attempts to signal a new moment in the brief and recent history of contemporary art within the non-fungible tokens space. A moment of multiple languages, histories, etymologies and ontologies. A moment of entering into the conversation, naming and renaming definitions, and working collaboratively.