Opening of “Melancholy is not enough…”
On December 15, 2011, PAVILION UNICREDIT opened “Melancholy is not enough…”, a new exhibition curated by Niels Van Tomme.
Participants: Lotte Van den Audenaeren (BE), Anne-James Chaton (FR), Andrea Galvani (IT), Jo Mitchell (UK), Matthias Wermke & Mischa Leinkauf (DE).
“A sorrowful pleasure”, according to Bulgarian-French theorist Julia Kristeva, melancholy is assumed to exclude any action. Besieged by one’s grievous state, one can’t react with or against this all-pervasive affective condition. Turning away from deliberately finding pleasure in overpowering sentiments and environments, as the melancholic subject is expected to in most conceptualizations of her state, the artists in this exhibition subvert the looming of melancholia into delight, relentlessly relating the physical places they navigate to the mental states they desire to appropriate.
From left to right: Eugen Radescu, Andrei Craciun, Razvan Ion, Anca Nuta
A special guest, Anne Barlow, the curator of BB5
Anne Barlow and Razvan Ion
“The exhibition, introduces an ambiguous site of insubordinate gestures, offering potential models to establish a position that merges tactical distrust with poetic action. Propagating ideas of imbalance and disobedience, it is a celebration of practical invention and moral resistance—the conquest of time over subjugation, and of defiance over sorrow—and the vast realization that melancholy is, indeed, not enough.”
Extract from the exhibition publication
Text by Niels Van Tomme
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