Exhibition
Citizenship is an expanding project. The recent advances in equality are fragile when seen against the scale of the history of democracy and in light of the rise of extremist nationalist movements. However, the global proliferation of campaigns that we have witnessed in recent years, from feminist or Black Lives Matter movements to climate activism, reflect a common desire to expand citizenship. The exhibition programme of INDEX 2024 celebrates that desire.
Set in the year of the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, this programme celebrates imagination and sensibility as acts of critical resistance and ideological revolution. In different ways, the works presented encourage us to reflect on current regimes of oppression and to imagine ways in which the project of citizenship can be expanded to include all the people and more, encompassing their relationships and interdependencies with places, landscapes, technologies, and materials.
Some of the works on display denounce topographies of ideological experiments, such as the island in Empire’s Island (Jonas Staal), the ongoing space expansion programmes in Future Light Cone (Kyriaki Goni), the archive of the Diamang diamond mining company (Alexa Szekeres e Remi Kuforiji) or the space of online propaganda (DISNOVATION.ORG). Others explore the body in its digital (Luísa Tormenta, Dasha Ilina) genetic, animal and political dimensions (Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner), its collaboration with other forms of intelligence – biological (SUPERFLEX + KWY.studio, Kat Austen) or artificial (Nestor Pestana, Total Refusal) – as well as the use of technology to uncover truths (Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Nicolas Gourault) and to create new visions of collective action.
Mariana Pestana
Curator of the Exhibition Programme
