Chronoplasticity

The works in Chronoplasticity attempt to fold or stretch time. They ask what and how histories should be told, and consider new conceptions of the “historical,” connecting the no-longer to the not-yet. Big events and political struggles of the last half century echo in the show, and many works speak to the tension between the personal and larger surrounding forces. Plasticity can also relate to the body, and its shape-giving or mark-taking encounter with something else.

On three floors of Raven Row, disparate positions are mapped out through the work of thirteen artists and one collective, selected by writer and theorist Lars Bang Larsen. In the top floor flat, itself a time warp, Bang Larsen has invited curator Juan Pablo García Sossa to make another exhibition. García Sossa has in turn invited fourteen artists and groups from the network of his ongoing research project Futura Trōpica for a show titled How to Eat a Rolex. In November, the Venom Zine Library, an archive of BIPOC zines assembled by Maya Acharya and Janna Aldaraji, will open on the top floor.

Bang Larsen’s selection of artists traverses geographies and temporalities. Sophie Podolski’s drawings from the late 1960s reimagine the nervous system, Adriana Knouf mixes with lichen to travel into space, Anna Daučíková considers the liminal body and Emanuel Almborg studies the social behaviour of babies. Öyvind Fahlström conjures the garden of his childhood to decry the present and usher in a better future. Textiles by Safia Farhat, Nelly Sethna and Synnøve Anker Aurdal reclaim cultural forms eclipsed by colonialism, while the embroideries of Zapantera Negra—a collaboration between a Zapatista collective and Emory Douglas, former Minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party—use traditional crafts to negotiate the idea of revolution. Dierk Schmidt uses painting to record the climate emergency as a continuation of colonial expropriation, and Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa’s drawings tell of Fascism’s abuses through his family history. P. Staff refracts images through a trans poetics, John Davidsen’s roses concentrate cycles of life and death, and Anu Ramdas has practiced clairvoyance on a residency in Raven Row, to channel its energies into a new series of drawings. 

Artists in How to Eat a Rolex include Aarati Akkapeddi, Aycoobo, Kathleen Bomani, Javier Guzmán Cervantes, Gabriel Chaile, Stephanie Comilang & Simon Speiser, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Sarah Kazmi, Marcos Kueh, Ximena Garrido-Lecca, Mwana & Latedjou, Paola Torres Núñez del Prado, Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín, and Moisés Horta Valenzuela—hexorcismos.