Now That We Found Freedom, What Are We Gonna Do with It? at HANGAR Centro de Investigação Artística
When most individuals consider imperialism, they image political-military hegemony. But at current, imperialism operates not a lot by way of warfare as by way of collusion between sovereign powers and business monopolies, through a set of readymade mechanisms that may pressurize peripheral international locations financially with out recourse to direct coercion. Curated by Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda along with Ecuadorian-Portuguese author Ana Sophie Salazar, the group exhibition “Now That We Discovered Freedom, What Are We Gonna Do with It? Narratives on Put up-Independence and Decolonisation Processes” speaks to the opacity of a system by which domination by parapolitical entities leaves a liberated but immiserated citizenry bereft of a transparent enemy. Hélio Buite’s set up Inoxidáveis (Stainless, 2020–22) delves into the casual economies that emerge out of what Andre Gunder Frank referred to as “the event of underdevelopment,” whereas Rui Magalhães’s video Pelo Poder, 2021, takes its title from a mural calling “for individuals’s energy.” Solely, right here, the artist omits the phrase “individuals’s,” leaving “for energy” hanging over an undone altar by which a raised black hand towers over empty bottles stationed atop stacked beer crates.
Mussunda N’Zombo’s efficiency, Salalé, 2022, satirizes the Angolan ruling dynasty and its Russian ties—a leftover of a Chilly Struggle–period proxy battle—by interjecting a Slavic-accented “niet” right into a mock presidential handle. Addressing the uneasy relationship of socialism and race, Yoel Díaz Vázquez’s movie Previsión, 2022, inquiries to whom revolution belongs by way of an exploration of the discussions surrounding the proposed removing of Havana’s monument to former Cuban president José Miguel Gómez, who was chargeable for the 1912 bloodbath of Afro-Cubans. In the meantime Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro’s collection of protean images, “Corpoflor” (Bodyflower, 2016–22) proposes a change that not solely is bodily however can lengthen to the social and the political realms and is thus accessible to all. Disenchanted however not defeatist, “Now That We Discovered Freedom” is aware of what to do with it.
— Ana Teixeira Pinto
