Smashing into my heart

The Renaissance Society presents Smashing into my heart, a group exhibition featuring work by Nairy Baghramian, Neïl Beloufa, Camille Blatrix, Xinyi Cheng, Tita Cicognani, Laurent Derobert, Ceal Floyer, Hervé Guibert, Park McArthur, Ebecho Muslimova, and Julia Phillips. Engaging with regimes of care, structures of support, horizontal relationships and non-linear intimacy,  Smashing into my heart looks at friendship as an aesthetic practice through which culture is remodeled or created anew. 

“Friend” is the loosest of terms we have for how we relate to each other. Michel Foucault calls friendship “a desire, an uneasiness, a desire-in-uneasiness.” Not always democratic or inclusive, friendship starts with negation: we collectively wish everyone else would go away. Friendship can be impolite, and as it unfolds, it can be opaque and asymmetrical, tortuous. It is tensile, capable of bearing heart-wrenching passion, ambivalence, or even the absence of feeling. It is sometimes what’s left when nothing else is possible.

More broadly, friendship is a mode of alliance that exists beyond typical kinship and outside of institutional relations (family, profession). It’s an elective affinity without finality. Being a good friend signals an inclination to form anomalous, unproductive bonds that exceed strategic self-interest. An essentially political relationship—one of allegiance and responsibility—it offers a framework for interrogating how we live and work and exist in the world. It offers a possibility for a new poetics of the Other.

The artists presented in Smashing into my heart don’t consider friendship as a theme or a subject but rather as a praxis. Their work embodies the fluidity and complexity of the notion, its non-abiding essence. For some, it is a condition of art making. “I paint people that I’m fascinated by,” says Xinyi Cheng, “They are my friends whom I find beautiful and eccentric.” For others, it is a model, or rather a formal metaphor as they touch upon overlooked structures of support (Nairy Baghramian), collaborative modes of production (Neil Beloufa) or systems of care (Park McArthur). Longing, love, and overflowing sentimentality are present too (Camille Blatrix, Ceal Floyer, Hervé Guibert), while irony has left the building. “Do you think you’re better off alone?” – the Alice DJ slowed-down version from Tita Cicognani’s video becomes a mantra for the exhibition as well as a cautionary tale for the dilution of the Other within the neoliberal narcissistic agenda.

Like good art, a good friendship is non-linear, it bears complexities and contradictions. Like very good art, it changes lives. Or maybe it saves them. 

Curated by Myriam Ben Salah.

Upcoming at the Renaissance Society:

Intermissions: Paul Maheke, Saturday, November 13—Sunday, November 14
Lydia Ourahmane & Alex Ayed, Saturday, Dec 4—Sunday, January 30*
Meriem Bennani, Saturday, February 19—Sunday, April 17
Intermissions: Joe Namy, Saturday, April 23—Sunday, April 24
Diane Severin Nguyen, Saturday, May 14—Sunday, June 19

*Dates subject to change.