On Belonging
3 - 27 June 2021
Bassam Al-Sabah, Moran Been-noon, Oscar Fouz Lopez, Maïa Nunes, Salvatore of Lucan and Osaro
Guest curated by Diana Bamimeke, in conjunction with Basic Space Dublin
Image credit: Kate-Bowe O’Brien
On Belonging was a collaborative group exhibition guest curated by Diana Bamimeke. It presented new and existing work by Bassam Al-Sabah, Maïa Nunes, Moran Been-noon, Osaro, Oscar Fouz Lopez, and Salvatore of Lucan.
Each of the exhibiting artists were invited to respond to the state of belonging: how it is conceived and made physical, and conversely, to not-belonging, and the outcomes of both in the modern world. Across multiple media, including installation, moving image and painting, these artists—all of whom hail from different ethnic backgrounds—articulated belonging in contemporary Ireland, in dreamscapes, and in digital hinterlands.
The COVID-19 pandemic undoubtedly brought practical challenges for the endeavours of arts & cultural workers, not least for this exhibition, initially programmed for May 2020. More pressingly, however, 2020’s raft of social unrest also had a marked conceptual impact. The police killings of George Floyd and of George Nkencho in the USA and Ireland respectively, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter demonstrations, recast the question of this exhibition as an urgent, critical enquiry. Each artist’s response took on a weightier meaning in those conditions, and formed part of an exhibition that changed in tandem with these landmark sociopolitical events.
These works invited the viewer to construct their own understanding of belonging, outside of its state definitions or socially prescribed understandings, which, if not entirely inflexible, undergo glacial changes spanning lifetimes. They explored a new, liberatory type of belonging that favours possibilities over established certainties; one which the feminist scholar Aimee Carrillo Rowe terms a “movement in the direction of the other: bodies in motion, encountering their own transition, their potential to vary.”