At The Gallery / Ideas To Make The World Bearable by Rafael Zen + Khalil Alomar + Lote84

 

 

July 12 – September 22, Massy Arts will host, Ideas To Make The World Bearable, a new exhibition by artists Rafael Zen (Brazil/Canada), Khalil Alomar (Lebanon/Canada) and Brazilian art collective Lote84.

The show will present the web series, Ideas To Make The World Bearable – a political education project that Zen organizes and coordinates in South America. Through a 10-class workshop the artist presented and discussed philosophical, political and poetic theories about togetherness, community building, post-identity, decoloniality, and anti-capitalism.

For the show, Zen and Alomar will create new collage and assemblage pieces as a take over of Massy Arts’ windows, and release the web series with English captions for North-America through Massy’s webpage.

Based on thoughts and ideas by over-excluded voices in theory research, the episodes will discuss authors such as: Alessandra Munduruku, Ailton Krenak, Homi Bhabha, Rosaura Sanchez, Maria Bento, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, Margaret Mead, Jota Mombaça, Frantz Fanon, Gayle Rubin, Maria Lacerda de Moura, Michel Foucault, Paul Preciado, Achille Mbembe, Bell Hooks, Paulo Freire, and many others.

The Massy Arts Gallery is located at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.
The gallery is open Tuesday to Sunday, 12pm to 5pm.
Entrance is free, and masks are mandatory.

Click here to register for the opening reception

To contact the gallery, send an email to: info@massyarts.com.

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The Show

for a wild method of bibliographic construction,
one able to collect the traces and to draw zones of contraband,
so theory is not reduced to academic circuits
with dusty libraries managed by mechanical devices,
because i will not write to obtain a title –
although I am aware of all the institutional rituals,
i write to turn things broader,
a knowledge aware of all the structures that try to silence it,
to erode the center by its peripheries,
i write to confirm my wild bibliography,
the one that dares to exist in the blind spots
of the official archives

jota mombaça / traces of an undisciplined methodology / 2016

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Ideas to Make the World Bearable (2020-2022) is an arts-philosophy-sociology project organized by artist in residency Rafael Zen (Vancouver, Canada) for the decolonial school and art collective Lote84, where they mediate debates on post-structuralism, decoloniality, anti-capitalist, post-identity and anarchic research through online and in-person workshops.

The project also unfolds into a series of artworks by artists Rafael Zen + Khalil Alomar, based on experimentations around video collage / analog collage / sound art / xerox art / and fragments of theory.

Poetically, the project allows the artists involved to experiment with the concept of an educational show built around different artistic processes – poetry reading, sound art, video collage, glitch art, and spoken theory.

By trying to reach a point where ideas can become as delirious as art itself, Ideas to Make the World Bearable also accepts the discontinuity of communication and information in post-global societies, creating a web of speeches that suggest more than admit, question more than give answers, and provoke thinking so it does not rest still.

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The Artists

RAFAEL ZEN is a queer South-American artist, researcher and writer currently living on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Zen holds a Master’s degree in Contemporary Artistic Practices researching anti-capitalist art, and also a graduate degree in Contemporary Literature researching queer latinx poetics. With over 10 years of experience in art education, Rafael Zen has been currently teaching courses about decolonial studies and activist collage at Lote84 (Brazil), where he organizes the commissioned projects: Culture and Confrontation, and Ideas to Make the World Bearable. In Vancouver, Rafael works for the Massy Arts Gallery. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the James Black Gallery, and writes about Arts and Culture for The Source Vancouver – Forum of Diversity.

KHALIL ALOMAR is a queer Lebanese-Canadian visual artist with background in Education. Currently living on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl ̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, Alomar has focused his latest work on installations that suggest a critique on contemporary religious practices, and collages that touch discussions on gender, race, and class. As an artist in residency for Lote84 since 2020, Khalil Alomar is a collage artist and sound artist for the projects Ideas to Make the World Bearable, and Everything is Collage.

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