Artists

Sung Tieu, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Tony Cokes, Hannah Black, Tiffany Sia, Ivan Cheng, Alessandro Di Pietro, Satoshi Fujiwara, Bernadette Corporation

Press release

Social Unrest is focused on contemporary riots, which have spurred a profound commotion in the analysis of forms of protest and collective violence. By observing its history, the project identifies a link between the latest manifestations of social unrest and a constellation of precedents, revealing their recursiveness in order to shed light on their structural causes.

Curated by Niccolò Gravina, with the historical research of Zoé Samudzi, the exhibition presents new productions by Ivan Cheng, Tony Cokes, Satoshi Fujiwara, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Tiffany Sia, and Sung Tieu, along with recent works by Bernadette Corporation, Alessandro Di Pietro and Hannah Black. The artworks are the result of a dialogue with the artists that has lasted over two years, and of historical research that has initiated their creative process.

The exhibition design, by the architecture firm SABOTAGE PRACTICE, develops as an autonomous structure built on site with found materials, such as cardboard and standard metal profiles for plasterboard structures. The construction challenges chronological linearity by preventing any overall view; configured as an obstructive barricade, it acts as a shattered device for displaying the works.

These contemporary uprisings are often represented by the mass media as violent bursts of upheaval, often lacking concrete programmatic demands: scattered, recurring phenomena difficult to pigeonhole, where ethnic collisions and class conflicts are often inextricably intertwined. Yet, the systematic emergence of uprisings, in relation to structural socioeconomic conditions, testifies to an imaginative potential that oscillates between disillusionment and dynamism, exasperation and relentlessness.

These events manifest a shift from the sphere of production—the strike that halts the factory—to that of circulation: uprisings that impact flows and markets. Looking back at pre-industrial history, the exhibition traces an affinity between the riots of that era and the contemporary world, experimenting with new strategies to interpret this transitional phase and the resulting crisis of aesthetic and political codes.

To shed light on contemporary revolts, through a series of artworks responding to a constellation of historical events, we will proceed backwards through the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests, the 2005 Cronulla riots in Sydney, the 2001 G8 violent clashes in Genoa, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the right-wing attacks on immigrants in Hoyerswerda and Rostock in 1991 and 1992, the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria riot in San Francisco, the 1965 Watts riots, the popular uprisings of late medieval Europe - the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the French Jacquerie of 1358 - and the Red Turban Rebellion in China, 1351–1368.

The temporal and aesthetic constellation generated by the exhibition thus outlines a heuristic system that, traversing history, alludes to the structural reasons that give rise to riots. What emerges is a fragmented and incomplete chronology that acts as a montage, testing the limits of a collective artistic effort to address political and social issues. “Social Unrest” illuminates the ethical and epistemological collisions of these phenomena, without omitting their more obscure and violent aspects, but contradicting their presumed irrationality.

Positioned outside the barricade as the exhibition’s conceptual premise, the video-essay Get Rid of Yourself (2003) by Bernadette Corporation combines footage of the riots during the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa with performances by Chloë Sevigny, Werner von Delmont, and members of the Black Bloc anarchist collective. This anti-documentary explores the aesthetics of resistance and the dissolution of individual identity: the riot is framed not as an assertion of political identity, but as a form of collective anonymity that radically challenges the social order.

Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings painted the new fresco Beauty and the Beast, focusing on the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, which took place in August 1966 in San Francisco. The riot was a response to violent and constant police harassment of transgender people, particularly transgender women and drag queens. The fresco addresses the potential for social unrest to undermine shared ideas of public decency. It oscillates between the didacticism typical of the medium and anti-historicism, combining the anti-fixity of the riot with the fixity of representation.

Above and reflected within the exhibition is Hannah Black’s representation of an astrological chart of the epoch-making Palestinian revolt referred to as «7 ottobre» or «Al Aqsa Flood». This representation of the chart is composed of semi-precious stones and gold chains. The work posits revolutionary rupture as providing points of orientation that structure history and render the future navigable.

It is partly inspired by Lacan’s observation that the recursive movements of the stars are the origin of science (with all its constructive and destructive power) and also resemble the recursiveness of the psychoanalytic symptom—the revolt as a symptom of an intolerable history.

Sung Tieu presents a new work from her series Read Me, Wear Me, Fear Me, composed of cotton clothes printed with newspaper articles about far-right attacks on immigrants in the former East German cities of Hoyerswerda and Rostock in 1991 and 1992, the early days of the reunified Federal Republic. The new work focuses on the riots, examining the most unacceptable aspects of these phenomena. By displaying the amount of information collected and associating it with the textile industry in which many contract workers were employed, the work clarifies both the extent of racial violence and the objectification of certain bodies.

Tiffany Sia’s Scroll Figure #5 and Scroll Figure #6 present the media presence and absence of riots on Berlusconi’s television networks at the peak of their influence. Appropriating Mediaset broadcast excerpts, these video sculptures examine television as the material and force of counterinsurgency and propaganda. Displayed on 22” screens treated with security foil, they overlay vertically scrolling texts atop laterally moving found footage. Part of an iterative series marrying video with the premodern scroll form, the works exemplify Sia’s practice of examining film and video as primary sources for structural reflection on geopolitics and Cold War narratives.

In his multichannel video installation The World Won’t Listen II, Tony Cokes explores the non-chronological resonances between the 1992 Los Angeles riots, sparked by the acquittal of officers accused of brutally beating Rodney King, and a series of other global social unrest. Television footage of the events in Los Angeles in 1992 is mixed with rap videos referencing the riots, soul music from the late 1960s and 1970s, and textual components, forming a non-linear continuum of struggles which, while ineffable in their causal relationships, contradicts their presumed irrationality.

Ivan Cheng has developed Revolt Pleaser, a video sculpture calibrating the erotics of figuration with interpretations of first-hand accounts. Departing from testimonials from religious and racially motivated attacks which have taken place in his lifetime on the beaches of Sydney, Cheng has written and recorded a series of short monologues. Presented through animated characters on small screens, this new series of work reflects on network technologies and social structures that distort and exacerbate division.

Entitled TO WONG - Attributed to Paul Thek (2017?), Alessandro Di Pietro’s sculpture is a time capsule composed of two bronze shields in the manner of Greek geometric style, which protect a film reel. The work appears to have been forced open, partially revealing its contents, which remain unknowable. The title and date could allude to Joshua Wong, leader of the Hong Kong riots, who was arrested and then convicted in 2017. Yet both the references and the attribution process are deliberately made difficult and uncertain, blurring the boundaries between art history and archaeology and revealing their fragility.

Satoshi Fujiwara’s installation GDP CN consists of photographs printed on industrial panels and taken in Wuhan in 2024. Suspended from the ceiling, the work intensifies familiar visual motifs to the point of making them unfamiliar, turning its lens on the rhythms of daily life and the social strata that sustain the city’s informal economy. Spectral traces of transparent gel overlap contemporary images, evoking the iconography of the Red Turban Rebellion (1351-1368), the mass uprising in China against the Yuan dynasty between 1351 and 1368, which ultimately led to its collapse.

Curated by Niccolò Gravina

Historical research by Zoè Zoé Samudzi

Exhibition design by Sabotage Practice