This exhibition takes its cue from the way that processes of mass revolt can suspend the expected timescales and norms of conventional politics. Even though any uprising emerges from long sequences of organization and social pressure, it is often experienced as a singular interval. In such a moment, familiar spaces become intensely charged with new meaning and uncanny simultaneities are formed across continents and time. One of the most lucid attempts to understand this comes from the Italian theorist of myth Furio Jesi. In his 1969 book on the 1919 Spartacist uprising in Germany, he writes:
“You can love a city, you can recognize its houses and its streets in your remotest or dearest memories; but only in the hour of revolt is the city really felt as your own city—your own because it belongs to the I but at the same time to the ‘others’; your own because it is a battlefield that you have chosen and the collectivity too has chosen; your own because it is a circumscribed space in which historical time is suspended and in which every act is valuable in and of itself, in its absolutely immediate consequences[…] In the hour of revolt, one is no longer alone in the city.”
(Furio Jesi, Spartakus: The Symbology of Revolt, translated by Alberto Toscano, pp. 54-55)
XIII includes works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection by Leidy Churchman, Kayode Ojo, and Catherine Opie.
