Artists

Adel Abidin, Saadia Batool, Tentative Collective, Sara Khan, Mizi Lee, Gulnur Mukazhanova, Vivian Ngozi Aghamelu, Duy Nguyen, Kevin Osepa, Laura Fong Prosper, Sina Seifee

Press release

How do we envision the future of a society that struggles to decolonize itself? How will the past be remembered, the present understood? How can we nurture the aspirations and imaginations of the present and upcoming generations for a desired future?

SAVVY Contemporary’s yearlong TRANSITIONS programme takes colonial heritage and decolonisation as facts and points us towards practices of transition. The fourth exhibition and the last segment is HISTORICAL CHILDREN: LULLABIES FROM WOUNDS TO WONDER which takes a cue from the agency of children and the youth in imagining the afterlife of decolonization.

The project is a collaboration with children and youth initiatives. We think and work together by questioning and complicating the western notion of childhood and recognizing it as a position of privilege. By witnessing and experiencing the complexity of this notion in varying degrees of adulthood and mothering, we acknowledge how each is dictated by racial and social hierarchies and familial traumas and how fear and self-censorship are inculcated. This collaboration is an attempt at activating capacities of the imagination and agencies of a young mind in the absence of inhibitions, where it can continue to freely respond and react to stimulus and be equipped with multiple forms of expression.

We think through the constructions of memory, remembrance, sense of community and Heimat that are perceived and imagined by a child or young adult. We focus especially on those who struggle to reconcile diaspora imaginaries, between the site of (ancestral) origin and the circumstantially chosen or imposed locality. In this process we expand towards the history of children’s resistance movements and their transnational resonances and connections as well as the existing practices and strategies of storytelling in reclaiming, retelling narratives, and the power of joy as a tool of resistance in nurturing new imaginaries.

There is a rich heritage of traditions and cultures that consistently invest in sustaining narratives and legacies through linguistic, sonic, literary, and performative rituals especially of marginalized and oppressed communities. We are also interested in the sounds and songs of resistance that have emerged from youth movements in their struggle to establish their rights. These practices are devised to counter historical and ongoing erasures including the experience of displacement, racism, and xenophobia, and to bear the burden of intergenerational trauma that is transmitted through generations.

With this project, we ask ourselves: How is the ethical and political agency of children and young adults situated in the current moment? What are the ideas being generated, what is being learned? And what is never learned? Engaging in interactive and participatory actions through visual arts and crafts, the written word, oral testimonies, sonic and instrumental traditions, new media formats of film and photography, theater and other embodied practices of individual and collective storytelling, we stage HISTORICAL CHILDREN: LULLABIES FROM WOUNDS TO WONDER. It is an exhibition and a series of children and young adult commissions where creativity and conviviality become a methodology of transmitting narratives allowing children to highlight their politics. Before the opening of the exhibition, we begin to work with young people whose creations will be included in the exhibition. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, projects by children will continue to be produced and included in the display.