For Guest at Gray’s last week, Charles Esche spoke about how art changes the world. He said it first changes perception and then our value system and then the world. I liked that.
He also talked about how the word «modern» in modern art can be problematic because one might fall for the modern-colonial trap which is basically about not realizing that eurocentrism is still a thing. He referred to Rolando Vázquez Melken‘s work about the decolonizing of aesthetics:
«Eurocentrism assumes itself as universal and assumes that there is no outside its own logic, so that there is no epistemic outside and no genealogical outside its epistemic territory. When non-western-centered peoples show that they have other knowledges, other philosophies, other forms of life, they are often seen as holding romanticist positions. We are told that everyone has been touched by modernity and that there is no such thing as an ‘outside modernity’. For decolonial thought, however, there is an ‘outside’ of modernity.»
Charles also mentioned Sandi Hilal‘s «The Living Room»:
The project is inspired by a story about a Syrian refugee couple Yasmeen and Ibrahim, who had moved to Boden from Syria, and continued what was an essential part of their life back home, opening up their Madhafah-living room to host both Swedes and others in their new home in Boden.
Turning private spaces, such as the living rooms, into social and political arenas, is often a response to a limitation of political agency in the public realm.
This project highlighted the importance of being a host and being a guest and finding a balance between both in the process of inhabiting a place. I thought it was funny that Charles Esche was a guest at Gray’s himself and was being terribly rushed to finish the conversation.
Maxim Zaragoza 