Duration: March 15 - April 20 2024

With: Clémentine Adou, Afra Al Dhaheri, Simone Fattal, Tamo Jugeli, Valentina Liernur, Ren Light Pan, Anastasia Pavlou, Ser Serpas and Minh Lan Tran

The collective exhibition Acacia Seeds borrows its title from a science fiction short story by Ursula K. Le Guin – The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics (1974). The “therolinguists” dedicate themselves to the study and the interpretation of idioms and writings produced by animals, plants, and possibly lichens, rocks, as well as any living or inanimate beings. Compiled into what appears to be a published collection of scientific documents from an indefinite time in the future, this novella steeped in humour defies the human conception of art and
language. With the same perspective in mind, Acacia Seeds proposes a group of artworks that function by manifestation rather than representation. The various practices brought together suggest the possibility of understanding things on their own terms, and question the legitimacy of certain discourses at the expense of others. Ursula K. Le Guin invites us to decenter our gaze and renew a contingent way of thinking – subject to history, society, oneself, etc – so as to embrace the potentialities of a kind of poetics that is neither
kinetic nor expressive, without figure nor alphabet, operating in a non sequential manner and untied from time. Each exhibited piece develops its own inner lexicon which, although never entirely disconnected from its physical and emotional environment, operates through its presence rather than a linear narrative. While the pieces on display avoid figuration, they still distance themselves from a modernist definition of abstraction – often a Western, masculine and liberal one – and challenge the notion that abstraction should exclusively be assigned to the realm of the speculative.
By defocusing from humankind and through fragmentation, the artworks simultaneously offer communication and uncertainty. Together they create a funnel-shaped liminal space where everything is absorbed, digested, and reassembled into a multitude of potential narratives – plausible, though more or less intelligible. Acacia Seeds sheds light on the ever-shifting (since it remains alive) terrain of cultural perspectives and weaves an aesthetic of empathy and memory that develops through stacking and stratification.

The exhibition was curated by Anna Frera