An Eye Dreads the Sun
An Eye Dreads the Sun
Materials are not silent witnesses. They carry stories and traces of origin and loss, and they pass knowledge on. In An Eye Dreads the Sun, earth, plant pigments, textile, sound and the human voice are put to work as carriers of memory. By making these material histories visible, the artists open up room for other ways of perceiving.
The title, taken from a poem by Etel Adnan, calls up an ambiguous image: the sun as a source of life, but also as an eye that witnesses violence, conflict and displacement. Sometimes it lights up the world; at other moments it lays that world mercilessly bare. Atousa Bandeh's monumental installation A Thousand Sunsets (2026) gives that tension a tangible form, gathering the ever-changing colours of sunsets and seeming to hold those fleeting moments still in time.
Memory and knowledge take material form in the work of AYO, Taqwa Ali, Jennifer Tee and Nolan Oswald Dennis as well. Taqwa Ali works with natural materials, among them plant extracts of hibiscus. In A Score for Atat's Homestead, AYO explores how sound can make hidden stories of a lost homeland audible. In Jennifer Tee's work the tulip points to colonial trade networks, while in Nolan Oswald Dennis's work archaeological fragments and raw materials testify to a living relationship between land, ancestral knowledge and memory.
An Eye Dreads the Sun is the closing part of a triptych that approaches transformation from a poetic as well as a political perspective. The exhibition asks how we might look at what usually stays out of view. Just as materials hold traces, so the sun throws light on what would otherwise remain hidden.
The show opens on Friday 11 September at 19:00. Alongside it run a performance by AYO, A Score For Atat's Homestead, on 19 September at 20:00, and Garage Café #16 on 8 October at 18:00.
Materials are not silent witnesses. They carry stories and traces of origin and loss, and they pass knowledge on. In An Eye Dreads the Sun, earth, plant pigments, textile, sound and the human voice are put to work as carriers of memory. By making these material histories visible, the artists open up room for other ways of perceiving.
The title, taken from a poem by Etel Adnan, calls up an ambiguous image: the sun as a source of life, but also as an eye that witnesses violence, conflict and displacement. Sometimes it lights up the world; at other moments it lays that world mercilessly bare. Atousa Bandeh's monumental installation A Thousand Sunsets (2026) gives that tension a tangible form, gathering the ever-changing colours of sunsets and seeming to hold those fleeting moments still in time.
Memory and knowledge take material form in the work of AYO, Taqwa Ali, Jennifer Tee and Nolan Oswald Dennis as well. Taqwa Ali works with natural materials, among them plant extracts of hibiscus. In A Score for Atat's Homestead, AYO explores how sound can make hidden stories of a lost homeland audible. In Jennifer Tee's work the tulip points to colonial trade networks, while in Nolan Oswald Dennis's work archaeological fragments and raw materials testify to a living relationship between land, ancestral knowledge and memory.
An Eye Dreads the Sun is the closing part of a triptych that approaches transformation from a poetic as well as a political perspective. The exhibition asks how we might look at what usually stays out of view. Just as materials hold traces, so the sun throws light on what would otherwise remain hidden.
The show opens on Friday 11 September at 19:00. Alongside it run a performance by AYO, A Score For Atat's Homestead, on 19 September at 20:00, and Garage Café #16 on 8 October at 18:00.