January has April’s showers

Borrowing from the lyrics of Radiohead’s 2 + 2 = 5, an impossible equation that became a slogan of submission in 1984, the group exhibition January has April’s showers examines a now ordinary dissonance: that of a world that prefers the absurd to questioning, comfort to the effort of thinking.

The exhibition opens on the catastrophe in progress, on the ruins of broken promises and perverted ideals. Dystopia is no longer a projection: it’s a state. While some continue to enjoy the pleasures of life and believe in modernist narratives, others choose disorder, the margins. Something persists.

Remains become the stuff of memory. They question how the world is archived, how it is translated into fragments. What do we do with what remains? How do we inhabit the aftermath, when the whole is no longer accessible, when meaning is reconstituted in fragments?

The exhibition affirms fiction’s ability to displace the imaginary. It claims the possibility of restoring utopia’s political and poetic power, not as a naïve promise, but as an active force for reconfiguring the sensible.

At a time when talk of collapse-ecological, political, technological and symbolic-saturates the public arena, the exhibition invites us to reconsider the ruin. Not just as a melancholy vestige of a lost world, but as a space of projection: a zone of friction, an unstable threshold where trace and germ, end and new beginning, coexist. The world is finite and it is not; it all depends on the stories we tell ourselves, and those we agree to believe.

In a world accustomed to fantasizing its own disappearance, it becomes necessary to invent other images, other languages, other habitable futures. Neither prophecy nor consolation, January has April’s showersreclaimsscience fiction and utopia as thought experiments: spaces of freedom where other ways of perceiving, relating and making the world are invented.

“The present world, […], is the ultimate test, it will break as it has already broken, in a crack that will be that of the earth, the waters, the stars reunited, and like a shell that opens, it will show new landscapes.“

Tabor by Phoebe Hadjimarkos Clarke